


fear in the eyes of your father

by Edoro



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Communication, Dysfunctional Sexuality, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Frottage, Hand Jobs, M/M, Other, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Self-Harm, Trauma, minor appearances from other canon characters and OCs, minorest canon character Thomas Whitman (is not an OC), navigating trauma in a relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 14:14:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Jamie DeCurry wants things he knows he ought not try and have.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is primarily a vehicle for my personal headcanons re: Jamie DeCurry. It includes several flashbacks to and discussions of childhood sexual abuse, in varying amounts of detail.

The trees widen suddenly out into a roughly square clearing. Jamie reins his horse up and sits, taking in the lay of the land.

Once, a long time ago, it must have been a village. The edges of the cleared area are too precise to be natural, and at regular intervals ancient foundations can still be seen sunk into the ground. In three places a crumbling stone wall or two still stands above the high summer grass.

Jamie dismounts and walks slowly from one end of the clearing to the other. Near the far edge is a stone well. He digs a piece of masonry from its lip and drops it down, and after not too long at all hears a splash. Whether the water is still good he cannot know, though it does not smell foul - just the normal wet and dark scent of a hole driven deep into the earth.

There are no bodies, nor bones, nor signs of what might have ended the village. Not a recent victim, then, this place.

Though void of human habitation, it is not dead. Flowers grow in wild profusion, turning the air heady and thick with their scents, and he can spy three kinds of grass as well. Fat bees hum drowsily from plant to plant, and all around comes the twitter of birdsong, the rustle of leaves, the grass sighing and whispering green plant secrets between its stalks as the warm breeze blows through it.

It puts Jamie in mind of a place he’d had back in lost Gilead, a smaller clearing in the forest near the castle with a deep little pond that was always cool even in the hottest, stillest depths of summer. He’d gone there when he needed to be alone, needed to be  _ quiet _ inside his own head.

He decides that it is a good place. He mounts his horse again and rides on, to scout ahead and make sure nothing nasty lies nearby in wait. Soon enough he turns back to meet the main bulk of their party and tell them of the place he’s found.

There is still plenty of daylight left, but it’s a good place to rest, a place where they can replenish their water and stores of meat, for the woods are teeming with game.

\---

Sometimes Roland drives them like he thinks that if they can simply travel far enough and wear themselves hard enough, they can outrun the shadow of the dead. Today, he is in a rare good mood, for they have recently won a victory against a band of Farson’s men, and when Jamie tells him that up ahead is a place to rest, he nods and doesn’t argue, and when they get there, he calls a rest.

Jamie stays long enough to put up his own tent near the edge of the clearing, in the lee of a tumbled pile of stone not high enough to call a wall. They are not, in truth, so many - a couple dozen in all, perhaps - but the rising hubbub of human speech has quite crowded out the steady peace of the clearing for him, and after the last two days riding point and sleeping well ahead of the party, he is not prepared to deal with it.

As he always does, Tommy finds him near as soon as they’ve stopped. He comes ambling over and lays out his bedroll beside Jamie’s, smiling his wide, good-natured smile as always. Jamie looks up and catches his dark eyes and holds them until Tommy looks away.

“Going to leave,” Jamie says. “Saw a patch of berries on the way in. Tell Roland.”

“Oh,” Tommy says, the smile slipping just a bit, “of course, and I’ll see you tonight…?”

Jamie breathes a soft laugh out through his nose and touches Tommy’s hand. “Tell Roland, then come  _ with _ me.”

And there comes the smile back again, brighter than before. “Oh! Of course, yes, I’ll go tell him now.” And off he ambles again, all tall and loose, to find their dinh and tell him of their errand.

Jamie slips away, into the quieter woods from which they’d come, and waits for Tommy. The party left a trail a blind man could follow, but he’s less certain of Tommy being able to track only him down through the woods. He’s light of foot indeed, and a better tracker and trailcrafter than Alain, even without the touch to help. And that, for certain, is not a direction in which Thomas’s talent lays.

He recognizes Tommy’s silhouette before he gets close enough to see his face - tall and broad, his dark hair gathered messily up atop his head - and steps out to meet him, holding out his hand.

Tommy takes it, and Jamie leads him into the forest.

While they walk, Tommy tells him of his day. He’d ridden near the end of their party, with Alain’s sister Claire today - who, he says cheerfully, Roland has tried to leave in the last three towns, but she’s kept with them, and last time said that if Roland asked her to stay back one more time she’d take him by the ear and give him such a scolding as would make old Master Cortland blush, so she would - and they’d had a nice long talk. 

He recounts the flowers he saw - three of which he stopped to press in a fat book of homilies that Jamie knows he’d begged off Alain for just such a purpose, for they were such a lovely shade of purple as he hardly ever saw - and an interestingly shaped tree, and an albino squirrel. The words fade into a comforting rise and fall of noise, the familiar stream of Tommy’s voice. Jamie lets it flow around him, treasuring what he does catch and letting the rest go, for oft-times Tommy simply likes to think to himself aloud.

“This place you’ve found us is lovely,” Tommy says eventually. Jamie tilts a smile up at him, pleased, for the place it reminds him of was a place he shared with Tommy a time or two or more. “It reminds me of the forest back home, when we were boys.”

“Yes,” Jamie says simply, and gives his hand a squeeze. Tommy gave him his first kiss in that old place. Not his  _ first _ kiss ever, no. That had been Alain some years earlier, in a corner of the hot and dusty mews among the flutter and rustle of the hawks, giggling into each other’s clumsy mouths - but his first kiss from Tommy. Plenty after that, too.

The berries aren’t far. It’s not a large patch, but the bushes are heavy with them, fat and deeply red and ripe almost to bursting, so that a sweet and fermented smell hangs about. There are plenty fallen off onto the ground already.

“You didn’t bring a basket,” Tommy points out. Then, in a tone of mild surprise, “And I suppose neither did I, daft old boy that I am.”

In answer, Jamie sweeps his hat off his head with a flourish and plucks a handful of berries to drop into it, eyebrows raised.

Tommy laughs. “That’s a good idea, that is.” He follows suit, and they pass an idle time without speech, only the rustling of leaves and the delicate little thump of berries falling into hats.

At one point Jamie looks over and sees Tommy standing very still, staring into his palm, which is stained a wine-ish color from a half-crushed berry. He stares, and stares, and then reaches out for Jamie with his other hand. He stops short of actually touching Jamie, waiting to be allowed.

Curious to see where this is going, Jamie offers up his hand. Tommy cups Jamie’s hand in his own, palm down. He plucks a berry off the bush and, with an air of great concentration, smashes it gently against the back of Jamie’s hand, until he is well covered with the dark red juice and pulp.

“Tommy,” Jamie asks, “what are you doing?”

“It’s almost… Your other hand,” Tommy says, reaching for it. Obligingly, Jamie raises that one as well. Tommy puts the two together, and Jamie thinks he is beginning to see the shape of the idea, here. “Please,” Tommy says belatedly. “Thank you. Sorry, no, I don’t think it’s quite right… maybe if I mixed it with some charcoal, or a bit of plum juice…”

Jamie’s right hand, with its port-wine stain covering all the fingers and the tip of the thumb, rising up the back nearly to his wrist and falling halfway down his palm as if he’d dipped his hand in blood, a vivid plummy color atop the natural brown of his skin; Jamie’s left hand, stained a lighter red from the crushed berry. The two shades are very close together. The skin of the berry is almost exactly the color of the stain.

No doubt looking for a pigment, Tommy is.

“Close,” Jamie says. “Keep a few for later. To experiment.” He regards his stained and sticky hand with some bemusement, wondering if he should just wipe it off on his shirt or jeans.

“Sorry,” Tommy says, taking his hand again. ”I’ve made you all a mess, and for no cause - here, let me -” And before Jamie can say a word against it, he lifts Jamie’s stained hand and licks it clean with a few swipes of his broad tongue.

Not that Jamie would say a word against it. The sudden warmth of Tommy’s tongue on his skin sinks into his bones and goes shivering up his arm. He stares at Tommy, at the little blot of berry-stain at the corner of his mouth. He is very aware, all of a sudden, that they are very alone and won’t be missed for some time.

“Oh, I didn’t - ought I not to have - that was a silly thing to do.” Tommy lets go of Jamie’s hand hurriedly, his voice small and anxious. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean- “

Jamie puts a finger to Tommy’s mouth. His lips are warm and soft and slightly chapped and slightly sticky. He’s been eating berries as he picks them. With his other hand, Jamie pulls a berry off the bush and, very seriously, squashes it against the corner of Tommy’s jaw, until the red juice goes trickling down his neck.

“Oops,” he says. He tugs the front of Tommy’s shirt until Tommy bends down, then goes up on his toes to lick away the mess he’s made, and then to suck at the tender skin there.

“Oh,” Tommy whispers, sounding a little breathless. “Oh, alright.”

Jamie is very short, and Tommy somewhat tall. He doesn’t keep Tommy bent over like that for long, for he knows it’s hard on his back, but takes him by the hands and leads him to a likely-looking patch of grass to sit.

There he climbs carefully up into Tommy’s lap, takes Tommy’s face in his hands, and kisses his sweet and sticky mouth direct. 

Under his palms he can feel the tiny shifts of Tommy’s jaw as their lips slide together. He ventures to lick the seam of Tommy’s mouth and Tommy mirrors him. There is a faint burst of sour-sweetness as Jamie licks away the last of the berry juice still on Tommy’s lips. After that, he just tastes like Tommy.

This is not new, but it is sweet in its familiarity. Since even before the fall of Gilead the two of them have taken what moments they can to sneak away and find some quiet and kiss, trading breath and comfort and love between them. There is a well-worn rhythm to it, now. It’s like a dance, the way their lips slide and tongues touch.

Jamie strokes the scruffy-soft line of Tommy’s heavy jaw. Tommy’s broad and long-fingered hands cup his shoulders, then slide down his back, drawing a wave of pleasant tingling heat in their wake.

Though Tommy is much larger, Jamie doesn’t feel small with him. Instead he feels held, kept careful and gentle and safe. He presses as close as he can against the front of Tommy’s body, hands winding up into his soft straight hair. Today it’s kept up in a messy bun. Jamie’s clever fingers find the metal pins holding it in place and pull them out. They’re warm from being held so close to Tommy’s skin. He tucks them in his pocket for safe-keeping, then carefully runs his fingers through Tommy’s hair so it falls smoothly down his shoulders. Tommy sighs appreciatively against his mouth.

Jamie has been so desperate lately, so needful of touch. It’s nothing new; he feels so often, and has become quite skilled at tamping down and banking his own desire. Ofttimes it’s enough to simply spend a span of time sitting and kissing and touching like this, holding each other close. Now, though, sitting astride Tommy’s lap and kissing his sweet mouth and feeling the heat of his body, the heat of his hands, it only fans the smoldering coals of Jamie’s desire into a red-hot fire.

With some reluctance, he pulls back from their kiss. Tommy blinks at him, brown eyes distant and befuddled. No doubt he’d been a-wandering, caught up in the flood of feeling.

Jamie cups his cheek, smiling, then reaches down and plucks at the ties of his shirt. He makes his eyes and brows and mouth into a question and does it again.

“What?” says Tommy, all slow and far away. This time Jamie reaches for the bottom of his shirt and gives it a tug, pulling it an inch or so free of where it’s tucked into his pants. “What - oh. Oh, yes, love, that’s fine, ‘tis quite a warm day, after all.”

He starts to reach for it himself, but Jamie shakes his head and gently pushes Tommy’s hands away. Greedy as he is, he wants to do it himself.

Slowly, with care, he unlaces the ties holding the front of Tommy’s shirt closed, the tension in his belly drawing tighter with each knot that slides undone. Then he reaches down to pull Tommy’s shirt free of his jeans - slowly, again, to savor the delicious whispery rustling of cotton against denim. When it comes free he catches a brief glimpse of skin, no more than half an inch of Tommy’s stomach above the waistband of his pants. That tiny, accidental glimpse knocks the breath from him, and his hands tremble as he lifts Tommy’s shirt the rest of the way off.

He takes the time to fold Tommy’s shirt and set it aside, trying to calm himself. He doesn’t wish to fall upon Tommy with grabbing, groping hands. After so long spent practicing self-denial, the quivering anticipation of looking and touching is deeply pleasurable in and of itself.

At first he simply looks, taking in the familiar but still stirring sight of Tommy’s bare chest and stomach. The skin beneath his shirt is even paler than on his face and hands and arms, dusted with curling dark hair on his chest and down his stomach. Jamie puts one finger at the hollow of his throat and traces it slowly down the center of his body, down his chest and down his belly, down through the trail of hair that leads under his waistband. Gooseflesh breaks out on Tommy’s skin in the wake of his touch, and he smiles.

Next he touches the beautiful, radiant rose tattooed over Tommy’s heart. With gentle fingertips he traces each fold of the petals outward from the center, and then follows each of the twelve lines radiating out from it, mouthing the names of the Guardians as he does, for the lines represent the Beams just as the rose does the Tower. Bird and bear and hare and fish…

He leans up and presses a kiss to Tommy’s softly open and inviting mouth, then settles back, hands going to the ties of his own shirt, heart climbing up into his throat. He wishes to feel Tommy’s bare skin against his, he does, to press up against him with no barrier of clothing between them. It’s dangerous, though. 

Tommy’s always been safe. Tommy doesn’t grab or pinch or grope at him. Tommy hardly ever gets hard when they do this, and on the rare occasions he does it’s a little frightening, but not near so bad as it might be with anyone else. A few months back Alain had - all on accident, he knows - pressed up against him in his sleep in a similar state, and it shames him still to recall his reaction. Tommy doesn’t  _ expect _ anything. Tommy touches him like he’s something precious and beautiful, some wonder of a bygone age, like a jewel in his hands.

Never before - never since those first few fumbling kisses, when they both yearned so badly for each other but weren’t sure what to do or how far to go or what would be welcome - has he felt so unsure about Tommy.

But he feels himself trembling on a knife-edge of need, desperate for something he knows he shouldn’t ask for and can’t have. No matter how badly he wants it, he knows that to try would be disastrous for them both. The last thing he wants to do is hurt Tommy or bruise the delicate and carefully built trust between them.

But gods above and spirits below, he  _ wants  _ \- !

A hand on his face snaps him out of his thoughts. “Jay?” Tommy says, all soft and tentative. “Alright, love? Only it looked like perhaps you were doing some wandering of your own, mayhap to a place better left alone.”

Jamie turns his head and kisses the soft skin of Tommy’s inner wrist, where his pulse runs hot and hard. “Fine,” he breathes against the beat of Tommy’s heart there.

He undoes the ties to his own shirt, pulls it free of his pants, then takes both of Tommy’s wrists and guides his hands down to where the hem of it hangs.

“Oh,” Tommy says, voice all uncertain and a-quiver. “Are you sure, Jay?” For this is one of Jamie’s rules, the ones which Tommy knows and remembers and follows better than ever he did any of their childhood lessons. Jamie is not to be touched unexpected, or for the most part touched before he’s offered an invitation or reached out to touch first; Jamie is not to be snuck up on, or held in certain ways which make him feel small and trapped, or picked up without permission; and if Jamie is to undress, to show Tommy any part of himself, he must be allowed to decide it on his own and then do it on his own.

“Sure,” Jamie echoes, holding Tommy’s gaze with his own. Mostly he hates to look into people’s eyes, but Tommy is different. Tommy doesn’t look so hard, with such vicious grasping intent, as most people do. And this close up, Tommy’s face is a pale blur, his eyes indistinct and soft.

Slowly, as if removing the veil off some artifact a thousand years old, Tommy lifts his shirt. Jamie raises his arms to let it be drawn over his head, breath stopping as it goes over his face and all goes dark - for a moment he is young again, small again, and it isn’t Tommy at all but - then it’s off and he can see the sunlight. Smell the drowsy summer forest smells. See Tommy, feel Tommy, know Tommy, know he’s safe. His heart is pounding so hard it’s a wonder Tommy can’t see it trying to beat its way out of his chest.

Tommy holds his hands out, hovering over Jamie’s bare shoulders. Smiling, Jamie takes one of his wrists and presses Tommy’s palm flat against his chest. Now Tommy can feel the way his heart is racing, and it isn’t all fear, either. Isn’t even mostly fear, now, in the afternoon sunlight with all the rustling and whispering sounds of the forest around them.

“Sure,” he says again, taking Tommy’s words to use because right at this moment he can make none of his own. “Sure, Tommy.”

Tenderly, reverently, Tommy touches him. He uses only his fingertips, the pressure of his touch so glancing it feels like being tickled with a feather. 

“So beautiful,” Tommy murmurs, eyes fixed on him. “So gorgeous, Jay, like the sea at noon and the summer sky - like perfect smooth stones at the bottom of the river, aye, and the cold clear water flowing o’er top…”

Jamie’s stripped his shirt off on a hot day in the company of his ka-tet before, and Tommy’s seen him even more bare - they’ve bathed together a time or two, for Jamie knows Tommy won’t ask about the scars, though he thinks if Tommy did he’d likely tell him - but he’s never let Tommy touch him like this before, not skin to skin this way.

So he holds still for as long as he can to give Tommy time to explore him. Each soft touch shivers into him and fans the heat growing in the pit of his belly. Though Tommy’s touches are featherlight, the weight of his gaze lays heavier over Jamie’s body. It is not wholly unpleasant to be looked at so - not here, not now, not by this man.

One of Tommy’s fingertips brushes lightly over his nipple, which is stiff already without ever having been touched. A stab of lust shoots through him, sharp as a gunshot, and he gasps out loud.

Immediately, Tommy stops and lifts his hand away, peering fretfully into Jamie’s face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to - was that - are you alright, Jay?”

“Alright,” Jamie whispers back. He can’t hold back any longer; he wraps his arms around Tommy’s neck, pressed wantonly flush against him, and kisses him good and deep.

He’s achingly hard, and if Tommy couldn’t see it before he can surely feel it now, pushing insistently into his belly. Jamie manages to keep himself from rutting his hips against Tommy, but only just.  _ He wouldn’t mind,  _ his fevered thoughts say, and maybe that’s so, but even thinking about doing it himself puts Jamie in mind of another time, a small time, when he’d been laid out flat and pinned down with the man rocking atop him, rubbing against him just like that, and his whole mind and body both recoil at the idea of wanting to do such a filthy thing to his sweet Tommy -

“Tommy,” he says, thin and desperate and breathless, pulling away just enough to speak into the space between their mouths. “Tommy. Tommy.”

“Jay,” Tommy sighs back to him. “Jay, Jamie, love. I’m here, aye, your Tommy’s here, what is it? Are you well?”

Which means  _ Are you frightened? Do you need to stop? _ Maybe he ought to stop. He doesn’t like to think about those things when he’s with Tommy. This is precisely why it’s dangerous to do things like this, because the better it feels the more he’s put in mind of those things he doesn’t want to think about. It feels  _ so _ good though, and he wants it  _ so _ badly, and he’s so tired of never letting himself feel anything good for fear of what it might stir up.

“Tommy,” Jamie says again, a hint of frustration creeping into his voice. Not at Tommy, no, but at himself, for he can feel the shape of the words he wants but not make his mouth form them nor his tongue push them out. He opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again and manages, “Talk. To me.”

He puts his face in the crook of Tommy’s neck, first just breathing in the scent of his skin and listening to the steady pulse of his heart. As Tommy starts talking, though, he starts to mouth and nibble at the skin there. He puts his hands on Tommy’s chest, between them, and runs his nails gently over him, to make him shiver. He trails warm, open-mouth kisses across Tommy’s throat, feels the words vibrating there even as he hears them being spoken, and delights in every little catch and quiver that his actions throw into Tommy’s voice.

When invited to - and often when not, as well - Tommy can go on almost endlessly. He does this now, rambling out poetry and observations about the world around them in equal measure, and while the words themselves are often quite dear, it is not the words Jamie listens to so much as the rise and fall of Tommy’s lovely voice.

And slowly, the dark looming shadow of the things he doesn’t want to think about retreat. And slowly, his good feelings start to come back, and he can focus on how every inch of his bare skin thrills to be so close to Tommy, to be touching Tommy, to feel Tommy’s careful hands smoothly rubbing up and down his back. He can touch Tommy and even shift against him in a way that sends a hot wash of pleasure shivering up from between his legs into his belly and his chest. 

They could just do this, he knows, until the light starts to fail and it’s time to go back. That would be good and more than good. He’d go to sleep all tight and taut and aching with unfulfilled desire, but that’s been the norm for him ever since he started having such desires. There’s a sort of satisfaction to it now, and he would have the memory of Tommy’s mouth and skin and hands on him to take to sleep as well.

But he is feeling safe, wrapped up in Tommy’s arms and in the sound of his voice, and he is feeling bold, and he wants more.

“Tommy,” he says, softly, so softly Tommy can’t have heard. He must have felt the puff of air against his neck, though, or the vibration of Jamie’s voice, for he stops speaking and his hands settle on Jamie’s waist, near encircling it entire.

He doesn’t know how to begin to ask for what he wants. He doubts that he could make the words come out at any rate. So he slides his hand down Tommy’s stomach, down to the waist of his pants, and then taps his nail against the top button there. A tiny sound, true, but it rings out loud and clear between the two of them.

Tommy goes very, very still, like a deer that’s just heard a branch crack somewhere nearby. 

They have talked about this, if only a bit. Jamie cannot speak of it for too long, even just to hear, and Tommy is painful shy about the telling of it. But he knows that people have done things to Tommy, if not precisely  _ what _ or  _ who _ . That’s part of what makes Tommy so much safer than Alain or even sweet and wicked and welcoming Cuthbert. Neither of them understand what it’s like to carry that sort of wound around in one’s heart, how sore it always is and how easily it bleeds, but Tommy does. Tommy is always so careful with him, and he tries to be careful in return.

So he taps his nail again against the bright brass button, letting the sound of his question ring up in the space between them. He pulls back, so he can see Tommy’s face. “May I?” he makes himself say, though the words come out clumsy from being forced. It’s too important not to ask.

Tommy opens his mouth. Tommy closes his mouth. Somewhere out in the woods a bird twitters cheerfully, and the wind goes sighing through the trees. No matter what Tommy says, Jamie will remember how sweet and pure this moment was all his short and bloody life, how it hung like a perfect bead strung along the wire of time.

Tommy opens his mouth. Tommy makes a brief, choked sound, and closes his mouth.

Jamie kisses the side of his neck, where he bears the crossed guns that Jamie picked for him. This man is his heart. His own was dealt a mortal blow years ago, but so long as he has Tommy’s to beat for him he can carry on. Since he can’t put Tommy in a box and keep him safe like that, he must turn his hand to any other form of protection he can find. Thus the crossed guns, meant so he can’t die of a bullet, just as the bullets tattooed beneath his knuckles are so he will never run out of ammo.

“Alright,” he says, and lifts his hand away. “It’s alright.”

“No,” Tommy says, and then immediately, “I mean - yes - I mean -” He puts his hands over his face, draws in a deep shuddering breath, and lets it out. “If you wish to - to touch my - to touch me -” the parts of his face Jamie can see have gone such an alarming shade of red Jamie almost wants to laugh - “I love you, Jay, I love you always and all ways, I love you with my whole entire, and I - if you want to - I’d like whatever you wish to do very much, aye, so I would.” Gingerly, he parts his fingers to peek out at Jamie with one wide brown eye.

Jamie takes his wrists, gently pulls his hands away, and kisses his mouth. It is a soft and chaste press of his closed lips to Tommy’s, sweet and comfortable and comforting. While he kisses Tommy, though, his hands go on a much less chaste journey. He unbuttons Tommy’s jeans with the same slow care he’d untied Tommy’s shirt, lust coiling like a spring in his belly, tighter and tighter with every soft rustle and snap.

Swallowing, his throat unaccountably tight and dry, he reaches his hand into Tommy’s open pants. 

First his fingers touch only hair. He combs his fingertips through it curiously, for Tommy’s hair here - while much coarser and curlier than the hair on Tommy’s head - is less tightly curled than his own pubic thatch. Tommy doesn’t seem to be breathing. Jamie moves his hand a little lower and then he’s touching skin, hot and mostly soft, and Tommy draws in a single sharp breath.

“Alright, Tommy?”

“Yes,” Tommy breathes, his hands settling heavy on Jamie’s slim shoulders. “Alright. Fine. Good. You - you have very soft hands.”

Jamie snorts out a laugh. He doesn’t start stroking yet, but simply sends his fingers exploring what there is to explore. It is both like and unlike the rare occasions he’s been driven to touch himself for relief. 

Everything seems formed much the same - there is the unruly thatch of hair, wilder and thicker than his own tight and tidy curls, the soft shaft and firmer head wearing its hood of delicate and wrinkled skin, the balls hanging beneath all soft and warm and heavy, and when he cups those in his hand and rubs that tender skin Tommy shudders and his own draw up tight against his body, throbbing in time with his pulse - but the simple fact of it being  _ Tommy’s  _ body rather than his own makes it all somewhat unfamiliar. Like visiting a neighboring Barony, perhaps, where folk are mostly still the same but have all their own little ways. 

Finally, he curls his fingers loosely around Tommy’s soft cock and strokes up its length, gentle and tender as can be. He keeps his eyes on Tommy’s face, watching for signs of distress. Though Tommy looks just as nervous as anything, he doesn’t look scared, or like he’s wandering off somewhere unpleasant.

He keeps stroking, slow and gentle, marveling at the way it slowly grows larger and firmer in his hand, as well as the way Tommy shifts at his touch, the little noises he makes. Though he’s familiar enough with how a hard cock feels in his hand - moreso than he’d like, in truth - he’s never stroked one up to that point from softness. Something strikes him as very powerful about it, being able to make Tommy feel so good and affect such a change with simply the motion of his hand.

Eventually he stops and pulls his hand free. A curious noise comes sighing out of Tommy’s mouth, a longing almost-whine. Jamie gives another one of his breathy, almost silent laughs and kisses him.

“Patient,” he says. He only wants to push open Tommy’s fly a bit more and move down his drawers so he can draw his cock out into the open air, for it’s getting hard enough now that his jeans are a tight fit for it  _ and _ Jamie’s hand. His own jeans are constraining him something fierce as well, but he’ll deal with that later.

He’s seen it before, albeit not like this, standing out all flushed and stiff and begging to be touched. An irregular blob of pale scar tissue on the left side of it pulls the shaft into a gentle curve, which shape Jamie traces with one finger.

“Cute,” he says, because it is, because it’s Tommy and he loves every part of Tommy, even this one which gives the both of them so much grief at times.

Tommy’s face flushes even redder - he’s gone red all down his neck and chest, Jamie observes with great interest - and he shakes his head, not quite able to look at Jamie.

“‘Tis - ‘tis a troublesome thing, it is,” he mumbles, “and I’d be happily rid of it, I would, for it’s never once been of any use to me.”

“Would you be rid of it now?” Jamie asks, taking it in his hand.

Tommy drops his head back, eyes fluttering shut, mouth falling open. His breath catches, then comes fast and shallow, and as Jamie continues to stroke him he grips spasmodically at his shoulders with trembling hands.

“No,” he says eventually, breathlessly. “Not - not just at this moment, no, for I think perhaps I’ve found - found some use for it, I have.”

“Have you?” Jamie asks, or tries to, meaning to tease, but what comes out is a choked sort of querying noise:  _ hrrrm? _

He stopped looking at Tommy’s face, is the problem, and started looking at his hand as it works Tommy’s cock. While it’s in many ways a captivating view, it’s too reminiscent. It’s too anonymous. It could be anyone’s cock in his hand, anyone’s at all. But there’s only one other person he’s touched like this - and as he looks it seems his hand grows smaller until he can barely hold onto it, and his wrist and fingers move not with the fluid grace of a trained gunslinger but the awkwardness of a child, and all he can think is -

_ big, it’s so big, it’s so huge and hot in his hand, worse in his mouth, worse pushing all blunt and hot and sticky between his closed thighs, worst of all when at last it goes  _ inside  _ of him -  _

_ in his memories it’s almost laughably huge, bigger than any man’s member has ever been or could ever be, and the rational part of him knows he remembers it that way because he was very small and very scared but the rest of him is still that scared hurt child and knows it’s because the man was a monster, everyone told him monsters weren’t real but this one was, it was real and huge and terrible and they let it eat him up -  _

_ in his dreams it’s even worse, in his dreams it’s so big that when it pushes inside of him he doesn’t just tear and bleed but actually splits open all the way up to his chest and spills his wet and bloody guts out on the floor, and in his dreams he doesn’t die and the man doesn’t stop but instead keeps on shoving rhythmically into him and says into his ear all panting hot breath that he must name the organs he can see, one after another, because he’s to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a doctor one day and he must know these things, he must know these things, he must know these things, he must - _

“-amie, Jay, Jamie, oh, love, what’s wrong? I’m sorry, please don’t -” 

Tommy is cupping his face, leaning in close to look into his eyes, his own wide and white and frightened. 

“Are you alright? No, stupid, that’s a stupid thing that daft old Tommy just asked, of course not - we can stop, alright? That’s fine, I don’t want to - to upset you - I shouldn’t have ever even - oh, Jay!” he bursts out miserably. “I’m so sorry, will you be alright? We can just go back right now, it’s alright.”

“Alright,” Jamie says numbly. He feels very far away from himself still, although the sight of Tommy’s face and the touch of Tommy’s hands is helping to ground him. Slowly, distantly, he becomes aware that Tommy’s gone almost entirely limp in his hand, and a jolt of fear goes through him - he’s  _ doing a bad job _ and if he does too bad of a job then he’ll be punished, he’ll be hurt, it’s bad enough just having to do it but it’s so much worse if he’s willful or lazy about it. He starts pulling at Tommy’s soft cock again, his hand trembling now from fear as it had earlier from excitement. Maybe, he thinks wildly, he should drop down onto his knees before Tommy and use his mouth. He hates doing that, for he always gags and the taste lingers in his mouth for hours, but he needs to do a good job, he needs to show willing, he wants Tommy to feel good -

Grimacing, Tommy reaches down and grabs his wrist. “Sorry,” he whispers again as he pulls Jamie’s hand away. Usually he wouldn’t even think of grabbing onto Jamie like that or moving him about. “I don’t - I don’t want that, Jay, not right now, alright? I want you to feel better, is all.” His other hand stays cupping Jamie’s face, thumb rubbing against his cheek.

His cheek is wet, he realizes. He’s crying, he realizes, in that slow silent leaking way he’d learned to do so no one in the barracks heard or asked him why, so no one heard and found him when he was hiding. He’d been so good at hiding, as a boy. Fiercely proud of himself for it, he’d been. Every time was like a contest with himself: how long could he stay hidden? Once he’d managed three days. Only been caught because he’d snuck into the kitchens to grab something to eat, only because one of the potboys had recognized him and collared him and dragged him back to his father for a whole silver coin. Hax wouldn’t have. If Hax had seen him, he’d have been allowed to stay as long as he wished. The cook had been a traitor, but he had been kind, as well, to a small boy who needed somewhere safe.

“Fine,” he tells Tommy. “Fine. It’s okay. Please.” He wraps his arms around Tommy and curls forward into his body, face pressed against his chest. It must, he realizes with dull shame, have been very frightening for Tommy to see him start to cry. Likely he thought he’d done something wrong. Very skittish about such things, is Tommy. Jamie had wanted to make him feel good, but instead he’s gone and ruined it, and now Tommy doesn’t even want him to touch him. “I’m sorry.”

The worst part, the part that disgusts him most about himself, is that he’s still hard. Not so desperately as he’d been before, no, but he still is. He still wants to touch and be touched, and he still feels a guilty shivery sort of pleasure at pressing himself all flush against Tommy’s warm bare front like this. 

“Sorry,” he says again. For all of this, for everything, for all of him. Not just for this episode but for starting it in the first place. For wanting things he knows he can’t have and for not being able to just fuck like a normal man. For getting so lost in his memories that he begins weeping like a child over something that happened years ago, and not even the worst part of it either. What sort of man - what sort of  _ gunslinger _ is he, to still be bawling over having gotten fiddled up by daddy a decade ago?

“It’s not your fault, Jay,” Tommy says, sounding mystified. “It’s -”

“Not  _ yours _ either,” Jamie interrupts fiercely. “More mine.”

“Oh, no, love, it’s not, don’t say that.” Tommy begins rubbing his back, smoothing his fingers fretfully down the line of his spine. “I know you don’t like to do such things, I do, and I shouldn’t have ever - only I suppose I thought -” He gives his head a shake, dark hair flying. “I’m sorry, Jay, truly I am. It won’t happen again, I promise you.”

Jamie makes a soft, exasperated noise. “Tommy.  _ Thomas. _ ” That catches him Tommy’s attention, though now that he has it he isn’t sure what to say. Or rather he is, but the words are stuck again, like a cluster of rocks walling up the well of his throat. Luckily, Tommy knows him, and knows that sometimes he gets stuck like this, and waits patiently for him to figure out how to say it, still rubbing at his back.

“I asked,” Jamie manages finally, the words tripping thick and clumsy off his tongue. “Wanted to.  _ Liked _ it.” A flush heats his face at that admission, even though it must have been perfectly plain to Tommy how much he’d wanted and liked it. “Didn’t - you didn’t  _ make _ me.”

Tommy mulls this over, his own face slowly going red. Eventually he ducks his head and mumbles, barely audible, “Liked it as well, so I did. More than I should, I know, for - for I try not to force such wicked wants on you, Jay, only you’re just so beautiful, and sometimes I can’t -” He stops and swallows, throat clicking. “I thought… Thought perhaps I had made you feel as if you needed to do it because I wanted it, even though you didn’t.” He peers miserably at Jamie through his hair, shoulders hunched, fingers all curled in against Jamie’s back like a swatted spider.

“No,” Jamie says firmly. “Did it because I wanted to. Promise.” A brief hesitation, and then, “Think you’re beautiful as welll.”

A soft, embarrassed silence falls between the two of them. Then Tommy speaks up, still sounding so fretsome, and says, “But you - your eyes got so very far away, aye, as far away and cold as the sky the stars live in, and you started crying, Jay, as soon as you saw my - “ he flushes so violently red now that his whole head looks like a tomato - “my member. Why…?”

Once more the well of Jamie’s throat closes up. This time it is a very long time before he can get it open again, and he can’t look at Tommy at all. Instead he ducks his head and closes his eyes and presses back up in close to Tommy.

“Told you,” he says with difficulty. “That my fa - f - my f - “ he can’t do it. He simply cannot call that man his father. Not for years has he been able to outside of the very occasional occasion inside his own mind. It was Robert Allgood who took guardianship of him from the doctor, who he’d spent restdays and holidays and birthdays with. Was Masters Cort and Vannay who’d taught him all he needed to know of the world. All the man who’d got him on his mother had ever taught him was fear and pain and silence. No. That man was not his father.

“I told you,” he starts again, slowly, eyes squeezed tight shut so nothing distracts him from his laborious speech. “That the doctor. Did things. When I lived with him.” 

He’d told them all that after the incident with Alain, for he’d gone springing out of his bedroll with a yelp as if he’d been jabbed with a hot poker rather than simply felt the press of a sleeping friend’s hard-on, and been in a fine panic for hours after. For days after found himself thinking of the doctor. Of the way the doctor used to call for him. Of things he hadn’t thought about since Gilead burned and he no longer had to brace himself to see the man’s face around every corner. Poor Alain had caught it in his thoughts and finally asked him about it. So he’d gathered him and Cuthbert and Tommy together, knowing they were concerned for him, and flatly told them the vaguest details of it, just enough so that they understood and would no longer ask or wonder.

(Roland, he could not bear the thought of telling. It had shamed him then and it shames him now, but when he thinks of facing his dinh and speaking of it, his guts shrivel up and his mouth goes dry and his throat closes up and he knows he won’t be able to speak even if he tries. Perhaps Cuthbert has told Roland, for there are few if any secrets between those two. Jamie would not begrudge him that duty, not at all.)

“Aye,” Tommy says, all low and unhappy. Jamie hates to hear him like that, hates to say anything that makes him feel that way. 

“Was. One of the things that he made me do. Sometimes.” His voice catches in his throat and he coughs to clear it. “Was looking at your face at first. Knew it was you, not him. But. Then I started looking at your - at my hand. And it reminded me of. Doing that. For him.” He is shaking now, shaking like a leaf in Tommy’s lap, clinging onto him and soaked in cold sweat. Never before has he spoken of this in even half as much detail, except for when - A sick bubble of nausea rises up in his guts, and for a moment he’s absolutely sure he’s going to puke on Tommy. Grimly, he takes slow breaths, teeth clenched, and the feeling slowly starts to fade.

“Jay,” Tommy croons, rocking him just a little in his arms. “Oh, Jay, oh, my Jamie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, love. We needn’t do anything like that again, I promise, I won’t ever ask nor even think of it too loudly, my dear Jay.”

Jamie shakes his head, weakly. “No. Liked it. Liked doing it for  _ you _ , Tommy. I want to touch you. Want to make you feel good. It was only bad when I stopped knowing it was you.”

“But I don’t want to make you think about that,” Tommy says in a small voice. “Never in life do I want to do anything that ever makes you think about that. And would it not be the same problem some other time?”

For a moment, Jamie feels utterly weary. There is almost nothing he can think of that the two of them could do that the doctor did not in some way do to him first and worst. He feels wretched and soiled beyond imagining, beyond all hope of cleansing, like a moldering old sheet so thick with dirt and filth it’s simply best burned, not even good for rags. Is this to be the rest of his natural life, then, craving an intimacy he can never have?

“No,” he says again. “Because… no. It is like… a picture in my head. Everything is all pictures in my head, always. I see that picture, of - of my hand on him, touching him - a lot. In my dreams. When I think about him. I see it.” He unwraps one arm from around Tommy and touches his frowning face. “Looking at you, I saw you. Knew it was you, and it was good. When I stopped looking at you, I saw him again. Do you understand?”

He’s not entirely sure he does, himself. It’s hard enough to think of, hard enough to feel, even harder to try to put it into words, especially when his throat is so tight and his mouth so dry and his voice so whispery and quivering.

Tommy nods slowly, still frowning, and raises one hand to put it over Jamie’s. “Aye, I think perhaps so. I’m only a silly daft Tommy, I am, but I think I see the sense of that, I do.”

Too exhausted to keep speaking, Jamie simply nods and lets his head drop back down to rest against Tommy’s chest. They say no more, but simply hold each other like that in the warm drowsiness of the waning summer afternoon, until finally it’s time to head back to camp.


	2. Chapter 2

A handful of days later, Jamie has decided on a plan.

Or, rather, he has decided that he needed a plan. He’s spent the last couple of days musing on the encounter in the woods and what had gone wrong and how he might make it up to Tommy more successfully, and while he knows the shape of his strategy, there are a few key details missing. This sort of thing doesn’t come naturally to him at all, but he wants to make it right. Tommy deserved that much.

One thing that had been drilled into him by his teachers was that all men have skills, but no man has all skills. It is only simple wisdom to recognize when another has more knowledge in an area, and to seek that knowledge out when applicable. Is that not, after all, the true purpose of ka-tet? One from many, brought together to fulfill a goal, each to fill in the blind spots for the others?

Thus decided, he makes his way into the center of the camp once they’ve stopped for the night. It takes some searching to find the right place; the cookfires dotted about ruin his night vision, and while he can see the shape of the man he is seeking from afar, when he gets closer in all the faces start to blur. Finally, though, he comes upon who he means to see.

“Cuthbert,” he says, stepping into the circle of the firelight.

Cuthbert twists around to look up at him, face splitting into a wide grin. “Ho there, here’s a face I haven’t seen in a dog’s age! Come sit, old fellow, rest those weary feet a while. We’ve a brace of wood grouse on the spit, and Claire’s brought us bread.” He gestures beside himself, where two quite similar figures sit, both blonde and round and sturdily built: Alain and his older sister Claire, who’d fled burning Gilead with them.

“Good evening, Tommy,” Claire says with a soft smile. Alain merely nods at him.

Jamie glances briefly at the two of them, nods his head in greeting, and turns back to Cuthbert. “I’d speak with you.”

“Well, that’s a rare thing indeed,” Cuthbert says. “What of?”

Jamie looks pointedly at Claire, and then Alain, and then back at Cuthbert. A moment passes, the two of them gazing at each other expectantly, and then Cuthbert seems to understand.

“Oh. Ah! You ask an awful lot of me,” he says, climbing to his feet, “but I shall leave my lovely companions for you, for I can eat a hot dinner with two beautiful siblings any day, while your words are a more precious treasure indeed.” 

He puts a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and allows himself to be guided out of the bustle and noise of the main camp, to the dark and quiet edge of it. There Jamie shrugs his hand off, unable to keep himself from brushing at his shoulder - the weight and warmth of the touch lingers unpleasantly on his skin. Luckily, he knows Cuthbert knows how particular he is about being touched, and won’t take offense to it.

Cuthbert makes a show of gazing around, as if he’s never seen this patch of woods before. “I have to ask, are you truly intending to speak with me, or is this simply a pretext to lure me out into the dark alone?”

“I’d speak with you,” Jamie says again. Though he had the shape of it well in his mind earlier, it’s hard to put into words now, with Cuthbert before him. A dull heat creeps up his throat and into his face, for ‘tis a private thing he wishes to speak of, and not one he’d share with anyone else had he the choice.

For once, Cuthbert waits patiently. He knows Jamie well enough to tell when he’s working on speaking, and though it may not seem so, can in fact occasionally keep his own mouth shut for five minutes at a stretch.

Finally, Jamie thinks he has the words he wishes to say. They won’t come easily, but that’s part of why he’s brought Cuthbert out here to ask privately, so no one else can see or overhear him stammering and choking his way through what he wants to ask.

“I wish to know. How you would go about. Seducing someone.” Jamie looks fixedly into the dark forest as he says this, not wanting to see Cuthbert’s face.

A long, stunned silence meets those words. Cuthbert draws in a breath and blurts out a nervous laugh. “Is this a jest? No, silly of me to ask, you never do such things, do you? A singularly jestless man, you are. So, I just want to make sure I haven’t perhaps gone mad or had a worm crawl inside my ear - you wish me to tell you how to get someone into bed? I don’t think you should have much difficulty with that, for you’re quite the comely fellow, though I must confess you’re about the last person I ever thought would ask me such a thing. It helps to be charming as well, but I figure you might want to simply lean on being pretty - no offense meant, but you’re just not a charmful sort, if you know what I mean.”

Jamie glances towards him, then away again, folding his arms across his chest. “Not - no. Not that. Not exactly.” This he truly does not wish to discuss with Cuthbert. If all goes well with what he has in mind, he may well get the chance to finish what he’d so disastrously tried to start the other day, but that’s between him and Tommy alone. “I just mean…” Frustrated, he makes a short, sharp gesture, chopping one hand through the air. It’s so clear in his head, but as usual, his clumsy mouth has made a muddle of it. “I don’t mean sex. I just mean. I want to make him feel - good. Wanted. Important.”

“Ahh,” Cuthbert says, knowingly. “You mean you want to know about the whole summer wine and picnic lunch treatment, eh? Well… I suppose it depends on the person, really. I wouldn’t take you out to a bar, were I trying to get in your -” a meaningful pause, during which Jamie is sure Cuthbert is doing something arcane with his eyebrows - “good graces, but if I wanted to show Al a good time, I’d stand him a hot dinner and a few mugs of beer, d’you see?”

A moment passes, and then Cuthbert asks, uncharacteristically tentatively, “You’re talking about Tommy, right?”

Jamie nods, then realizes Cuthbert may not be able to see the motion in the dark. “Yes.”

“Mm. Well, honestly, I think he’s well and truly fallen for you already. I suppose, though,” he says, his voice taking on a musing tone, “that were I trying to seduce Tommy, I’d do well to take him out for a nice walk through the woods, maybe find a river to sit by or some flowers to gather or something. Buy him some paper if I could for him to draw on, mayhap. Everything you’ve already been doing, really. You seem to have his wants well in hand.” He falls silent again for a time, then clears his throat. “Jamie, I have to ask - did something, well,  _ happen _ between the two of you the other day? For he’s been acting passing strange since then, and putting Claire and Alain both in quite a fretsome mood.”

A brief flare of anger, hot as a coal in his throat. He gives Cuthbert a hard look, then looks away, and puts his hand to his mouth to keep any hard words from coming out. It’s only that Cuthbert cares for Tommy, he knows - and he’s been more than a little worried about Tommy himself. These past couple of days he’s been oddly distant, not cold but simply more prone to wandering than usual and harder to call back. 

Still, he can’t help feeling resentful. Cuthbert, he knows, has no issues whatsoever with sex. Cuthbert, he is sure, couldn’t even imagine how it feels to be pulled between fear and desire until it seems he might be pulled right apart. When Cuthbert wants someone, he has them and enjoys it and thinks no more of it.

And it may not be Cuthbert’s fault that things aren’t so simple for Jamie - no, not at all, he knows it isn’t, just as he knows that Cuthbert means only well by his words - but it hurts all the same to be reminded of that gulf between them. Of how Cuthbert so easily has what Jamie so badly wants and doesn’t even think twice about it. Doesn’t even think  _ once _ about it, most times, belike. Just the same as it had always hurt to be around Cuthbert and his parents. They’d shown him every courtesy and been so kind to him, but it had ever been a reminder that they weren’t truly his, he wasn’t truly theirs, and he’d never have the sort of easy relationship Cuthbert took for granted.

“It’s between us,” Jamie says at first, coolly. Then, because he doesn’t wish to be unpleasant when he’s come asking for advice, he says, “It’s fine.”

“Alright,” Cuthbert says doubtfully. He doesn’t push, though. He can recognize by the flat sound of Jamie’s voice that now is not a time for pushing. “Well - whatever it is you’re trying to do, I’d suggest you simply find some time to be alone together and talk to him and see where it goes from there. You know what he’d like in that arena better than I do, I wot.”

\---

Three days after that, they come upon a town. Usually towns make Jamie nervy, even small ones, and this one is larger and more prosperous than most. They ride in with the last of the good afternoon light, and for hours of their approach Jamie can smell the stink and hear the bustle of the place. He can imagine well the press of human bodies in the place, everyone looking and grabbing and yelling all the time over everything. He wants no part of it.

All the same, his mood is not entirely foul. His plan has slowly crystallized into being, and this is the perfect chance to set it into motion. 

It’s a well-sized town, used to accommodating travelers, and that means a handful of inns and rest-houses. While the bulk of their party trails along behind, maneuvering horses and baggage and negotiating who will stay where, Jamie slips away to one of the better-looking inns. The common room is crowded with jostling strangers and reeks of smoke and beer and too many bodies jammed in too close together, but he slips through them without more than brushing up against anyone. At the counter he speaks to the innkeep and negotiates himself a private room, a private meal for two, and a bath brought up when he asks for it. He has no heart for dickering, so he pays more than he ought to, but if all goes well he’ll count it worth it at twice the cost. Then he slips back out into the relatively fresher air of the street to wait.

His belly crawls like a nest of snakes. Excitement is the largest part of it, but there’s nervousness there too, all sour and sharp. Things have not been quite right between him and Tommy since that day in the woods. 

They can’t be said to have been avoiding each other, exactly - Jamie has ridden several hours out front of the main party just as he usually does, while Tommy has ridden with them just as he usually does, and they’ve met and laid their bedrolls down next to each other to sleep together at night just as they usually do, but there’s been a tension all the same. Tommy’s taken to touching him like cracked glass about to break, and he’s only grown ever more distant.

And for Jamie’s part, the last few days have been a misery of conflicting emotions. None of his usual techniques have worked to banish them. No matter how still he makes himself be in his mind, or how far he detaches himself from any thoughts or concerns not related to the immediate present moment, the whole wretched tangle of feelings still awaits him as soon as he comes back to himself.

Chief among them is shame for the scene he made, for having upset Tommy, for still being so childishly afraid. Frustration goes hand in hand with that one, for his response to feeling shamed has ever been to be angry at himself for having acted shamefully. He’s been worried for Tommy, more and more each day - he’d have to be blind not to be - and worried for how badly he’s damaged the sweet thing growing between them.

And then worst of all:  _ want _ . Some selfish part of him is glad indeed they’ve only seen each other to make camp and go to sleep, for he doesn’t know he could have stood being any closer. His mind keeps circling relentlessly back to that day in the woods like a vulture over a carcass, swooping in again and again. Just being near Tommy makes his heart pick up. Actually laying down beside him to sleep, feeling the solid warmth of his body so close by, waking in the night to find Tommy loosely curled around him - he’s laid awake every night a-tremble and a-fire with need. 

His dreams have been an especial torment. Perhaps were they simply of what he wants, he wouldn’t mind so much, for at least he’d be getting some satisfaction from some quarter. They’ll start off sweet enough, yes, and grow to a delicious fever-pitch of mutual satiation, but at some point mid-way along or towards the end, it won’t be Tommy with him anymore but the doctor. Most of them he’s woken from hard and wanting to pinch the awful thing until it stops troubling him so. Twice, though, he woke to a sticky mess in his pants and spent most of the day in a fine fury with himself.

There’s simply been no further time nor place to try and work things out. Now, though, tonight, they’ll have four walls and a door between the two of them and anything or anyone that might want to interrupt them, and he’ll make it right.

\---

By the time the rest of the party comes straggling in, having settled everything away square, it’s nearly full dark. It’s just occurred to Jamie to worry that perhaps Tommy decided to stay back with those who will be camping out beyond the borders of the town - there are enough of them now to rightly be called a small army, and too many to easily or comfortably accommodate in even a relatively large town such as this - when his roving eye catches the familiar shape of his silhouette coming down the street.

He’s being guided in by Cuthbert, who’s looped an arm through his as if escorting a fine lady to dinner. He doesn’t look as if he’s wandered off too far in his own head, but simply as if he’s tired. Sore, too, no doubt. Poorly stitched and easily bruised, Tommy is, and sleeping rough does him no favors.

People have been walking blithely by Jamie all evening without so much as a flickering glance to indicate they’ve noticed him. Still, as soon as they get close, Tommy raises his head and then raises a hand, smiling a road-weary smile.

“Hullo, Jay,” he says. 

Jamie slips out from the pool of shadow he’s been standing in and returns Tommy’s wave and smile both. “Hile, Tommy.”

“Oh, who’s this mysterious fellow come sliding out of the shadows here?” Cuthbert asks, grinning widely. “I do believe ‘tis your noble swain, Tommy, come to take you away from me and sweep you off your feet! I shall pass you now into his care, and mind you bring him back in the same condition in which I gave him to you, or there shall be a steep fine.” He draws his arm out from Tommy’s and steps aside, performing a flourish with his hands as if presenting Tommy.

Jamie silently raises his eyebrows, but takes ahold of Tommy’s elbow all the same. “I’ve bought us a room for the night,” he says softly. Tommy hums vaguely in response, which might mean he heard but might also just mean he knows Jamie spoke but couldn’t hear or wasn’t paying attention enough to know what was said. Either way, he allows himself to be led through the common room and up the stairs to their room.

It’s a small room, tucked up under one of the eaves of the roof, but fine enough after weeks on the road. There’s a window, which Jamie props open so as to get a breeze, and a bed with a mattress which looks clean enough, and a little wooden side-table with a pitcher of fresh water on it. Best of all, it is snug and private and quiet. Jamie walks Tommy over to the bed and bids him sit down, which he does amiably enough.

“I’ve paid for a bath as well,” he says, reaching out to smooth back a strand of stray hair fallen into Tommy’s face. “And dinner. I’ll go have the tub brought up.” He’s loathe to walk back into the noise of the common room below, truth be told, but he’s hardly going to make Tommy do it.

When he comes back into the room, Tommy is still sitting right where he left him on the bed. He’s taken his boots off, at least, and is looking around with a vaguely bemused air, as if not entirely sure when or how he got there.

Jamie settles lightly beside him on the bed, close enough their shoulders touch. “I’ve told them to bring up the tub.”

“The tub?” Tommy echoes vaguely. “Oh, yes. A bath sounds lovely, Jay, it surely does. I think I’m more dust than Tommy, at this point.”

“Soak as long as you’d like,” Jamie assures him. “I said to be sure it’s good and hot.” While they wait, he slides his arm around Tommy’s waist, and lets Tommy lean over against him, warm and close and - indeed - quite dusty. 

Theirs is an upper room, so it takes a time for the great copper washtub to be brought and then filled. The water, Jamie is pleased to see, is indeed steaming hot.

Once the maids are gone, he turns his attention back to Tommy. “Up now,” he says encouragingly. “Good and hot and waiting.”

“Oh,” Tommy says, waving a hand, “you can go first, Jay, I don’t mind.”

Jamie tips Tommy’s chin up to look him in the eyes, smiling a small smile. “Was thinking we could go together. It’s large enough.” And he’s small enough to sit easily between Tommy’s long, gangling legs, and lean back against him without being much trouble.

“Oh,” Tommy says. He doesn’t brighten up, though, as Jamie would have expected him to. Instead he casts a glance towards the tub that is nearly fretful. “If you’re sure…? I wouldn’t want to crowd you or any such thing.”

“Waste not,” Jamie says primly. He slips his hands beneath Tommy’s arms and gives him a bit of a tug. Not enough to actually move him, for hauling him up like that would put painful strain on the sockets of his shoulders, possibly even enough to jar an arm loose from its moorings, but enough to get his meaning across. “Wash my back for me. I’ll do yours.”

“Well,” says Tommy in the tones of a man who wants to be convinced into doing something he doesn’t think he ought to do. “If you insist, Jay?”

“I do. I insist. Very firmly.” Letting go of Tommy, he makes quick work of the ties of his shirt and lifts it up off his head, tossing it carelessly towards the bed. Next his pants; he carefully doesn’t look at  Tommy as he skims his jeans and drawers down and kicks them aside. It’s nothing Tommy hasn’t already seen anyway, scars and all, but typically when they bathe together his cock isn’t halfway to hard and sticking out the way it is now. 

Behind him come the shuffling, rustling sounds of Tommy undressing. Then he pads past, pale and bare, shooting an oddly nervy glance towards Jamie on his way to settle himself into the washtub.

Jamie frowns a bit to see him. A fine crop of bruises has grown up on his arms, not so unusual, but nothing he likes to see. What is unusual is the flash he got of one long thigh as Tommy climbed over the edge of the tub and folded himself down into it, all yellowy and brown with old bruises as well.

He has to lift one leg over the edge and practically sit on it to get the rest of himself in, offering quite a show, though the sight of those bruises on Tommy’s legs has somewhat doused his excitement. Tommy does look at him, gaze tracking down his body, and then looks quickly away.

Jamie settles into the tub, not leaning back against Tommy as he’d intended, but facing him. The maids put the tub beneath one of the gaslights on the wall, so there’s light enough for him to see. Even beneath the rippling water, the bruises are visible enough.

“Tommy,” he says softly, reaching out to touch one, an ugly bloom near the size of his hand, green in the middle and yellow and brown around the edges. Gently, ever so gently, just the barest brush of his fingertips over it, for even though they must be a handful of days old, they look tender. “What happened?”

Tommy’s shoulders hunch up a bit, his head sinking down between them, so he takes on the appearance of an especially miserable turtle. “Well,” he says, knitting his fingers together fretfully. “Well. I shouldn’t wish to do anything - anything  _ improper _ again, no I should not. Only you know me, I don’t learn quickly. Aye, just a silly daft Tommy, I am, and I should suppose the - the little head is even dafter than the big one, it is.” A red flush has begun to creep across his cheeks, and he looks at Jamie only in darting little glances. “I’ve had to teach that stupid thing the same lesson a time or two or three, only - only don’t worry -” this in a tone of reassurance - “for it’s learning well, and I shan’t - I shan’t do anything to upset you again, no.”

Jamie is quiet for so long, just looking at him, that Tommy finally looks at him for longer than half a second, and says very timidly, “Jay?”

“You did this to yourself,” Jamie says slowly, touching Tommy’s thigh again. “Because - because of what happened?”

“Well, yes.” Tommy is still looking at him now, his dark eyes round and wide and bewildered. “Because I upset you -”

“ _T_ _ his _ upsets me.” Not just because he hates to see Tommy hurting, either. No, it’s also because he understands well enough himself. It’s been a long time since he did himself harm, but the urge still rises up in him at times. Back before he knew how to deal with his own urges in a more manful fashion, there’d been periods of time he’d pinched and squeezed that hateful bit of meat hanging between his legs ‘til it was bruised so tender it hurt to even take it out to piss with. So he understands well indeed the sick, humiliated fury of one’s own body refusing to obey, and he hates to imagine even for a second that Tommy has felt that way. Hates even worse to know it, and to know it’s because of him.

“I’m sorry, Jay,” Tommy says. “I know it can’t hardly be called graceful, but, well - I’m sorry. You won’t have to see anymore, I promise you that, for I’ll get it down well enough and not need to - I didn’t want you to see, I didn’t, only -”

“Not to  _ see _ it. That you  _ did _ it.” Jamie gets up on his knees, mindless of the hard bottom of the washtub, and shuffles in as close to Tommy as he can get. The water ripples and slops back and forth around them as he shifts, wafting up clouds of steam. “Don’t want you to hurt yourself. Told you that wasn’t your fault.” And he’d thought that good enough, fool that he was.

“But -” Up this close, with the steam and the flickering gaslights, Tommy’s face is largely indistinct, just a pale oval with two dark eyes and a moving mouth, but Jamie can hear his bewilderment well enough in his voice. “You were so upset, Jay, and it never would have happened if I hadn’t gotten - if I hadn’t been too - too  _ excited _ .”

“Wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t asked to touch you,” Jamie counters. “Or if I’d been smarter about it. Wasn’t upset because of  _ you _ , Tommy.”

“Then I suppose I don’t understand why,” Tommy says after a moment, a thread of stiff frustration running through his voice. “If it wasn’t because you were touching me, then why?”

“Because…” Jamie licks his lips, thinking. “I told you. I started thinking about… something else. A different time. Because I stopped knowing it was you.” He reaches out and takes Tommy’s face in his hands. “I liked it when I knew it was you. I want to do those sorts of things with you. I want you to want me.” Admitting that makes him feel terribly raw, terribly naked. The weight of being  _ wanted _ is so much - but it’s true enough, as far as Tommy is concerned. From Tommy, he can bear it.

“Do you truly?” Tommy whispers. He looks and sounds so small, all hunched into himself against the edge of the tub. “You aren’t just saying so because you think I want you to? For I love you so, Jay, I’d be happy never to do anything like that again if it was what you wanted. I’d rather cut this thing right off me than ever make you frightened or make you think about - about things which upset you so.”

“I truly do,” Jamie says. Leaning in, he draws Tommy’s face to his and plants a gentle kiss at the corner of his mouth. “I love you very well. I want you very much. I want you to desire me.” Each statement is punctuated with another kiss, each one firmer and deeper than the last. “I do not,” he says after they pull apart from the last one, breathing a little faster now, “want you to cut anything off. Like all of your parts right where they are.”

Finally, Tommy reaches out to touch him. It’s still tentative, a hovering touch of his palms against Jamie’s shoulders, but better than him shrinking away as if he could go right through the tub. “I suppose I cannot argue, then.”

“No.” Another kiss, his hands sliding down from Tommy’s face to rest flat against his broad chest. Face hot, he leans in close to murmur in Tommy’s ear, “Had hoped perhaps we could try again. Tonight. If you wish. If you’re not…” He doesn’t manage to summon up the rest of that sentence, even in his own head. He’s spoken more tonight to Tommy than he has to everyone else put together for the last week, and he is just about all out of words.

“Oh,” Tommy says, and lets loose a breathless, nervous little laugh. “I - well - if you’re sure you won’t get upset? Only I truly don’t wish for you to be frightened like that again.”

“Won’t,” he manages to make himself say. “Promise.”

“Then I’ll give it a try. Although,” Tommy goes on, trying to sound as stern as he ever can, “if you seem to be a-wandering or a-worrying, why, I’m going to put a stop to things right then, no matter if you beg me.”

Privately, Jamie is doubtful of that, for he knows that sternness is not in Tommy’s nature, and neither - though he tries not to take advantage of this - is telling him no. He’s thought long on what happened and how well it went up until then, and he is almost certain he knows how to keep things from going badly this time.

He leans forward, resting most of his weight against Tommy’s chest - deliciously aware of how all of that bare, wet skin against his - and snags the wood-handled scrubbing brush the maids had brought in with the tub, then sits back flat on the bottom of the tub, holding it up pointedly. They’re dirty and dusty from weeks of travel, both of them, and so the bath must come before any fooling about.

There follows several minutes of industrious scrubbing, accompanied by the gentle sounds of water sloshing about. They don’t speak to each other, but they don’t need to; this is a familiar enough ritual that they can move around each other easily. The rising heat melts away the tension of the previous few days, and they both of them gradually relax. By the time Jamie shifts around to present his bare, wet back to Tommy for scrubbing, he is in a state near somnolence, and could probably quite happily fall asleep in the tub.

Tommy’s broad hands thoroughly soap, scrub, and rinse his narrow back. His skin tingles beneath the touch, tightening up in waves of pleasurable gooseflesh all the way to the crown of his head. The drowsy warmth suffusing him takes on a different note, heavy and biding, like the breathless moment before a storm breaks and the rain begins. Slowly, his thoughts return to the track they’ve been on all day - of what, hopefully, will happen once they’ve finished with their bath - and though he’d normally try to stifle them, this time he gives his mind free rein. They have, after all, both agreed that they want to do it; there is a wholly new and deeply pleasurable sort of anticipation to that.

He leans forward, eyes mostly shut, while Tommy rubs at his neck and shoulders. Blissful though it is, he doesn’t let himself enjoy it over long. The joints of Tommy’s hands slide easily out of true with very little force, and he knows from past experience that if he doesn’t make Tommy stop, he’ll go on until he’s hurt himself.

So he allows himself a minute or so, then turns to face Tommy and makes a twirling motion.

Tommy obediently shuffles himself around. Being much taller and longer of limb than Jamie is, and consequently taking up much of the tub as he is, it is a bit more of a process, but eventually he comes to rest with his knees folded up against his chest and the broad expanse of his back towards Jamie.

Jamie slides forward, fitting his knees around Tommy’s waist so they are as close as possible. It is deliciously suggestive to sit so, legs practically wrapped around Tommy, bare inches away from being pressed flush against him. He takes a moment to simply admire Tommy’s back, the width of his shoulders and the graceful dip of his spine, the smooth skin and musculature beneath. He admires it with his eyes and then with his hands, as well, smoothing his palms down the length of Tommy’s body from shoulder to hip and then back up again, smiling when it makes him shiver.

He gently gathers Tommy’s hair and drapes it over the front of one shoulder, then gets to work washing. There is quite a lot of area to cover, and he does not wish to skimp in his work. Slowly and carefully, he works the rough and unscented cake of soap they’ve been brought into a lather and spreads this across Tommy’s back, and then equally slowly he scrubs away the dirt and sweat and dust of their travels, and then with the utmost care does he rinse all that away with cupped handfuls of water.

Then he sets his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and begins, very gently, to rub the tension from his muscles. He’s much improved already, no longer all miserably hunched in and trying to be as small as possible, but still knotted up tight along his neck and shoulders. Jamie knows every place where he tends to get tender, and so he rubs the knots out and strokes at every sore spot, until Tommy lolls bonelessly back against him, sighing.

“That’s lovely, Jay, that is,” he says softly, sounding muzzy, almost drunk. Half-asleep, is what Jamie suspects.

“Mm.” Jamie presses a kiss to one shoulder and wraps his arms around Tommy, hands linked over his belly. Tommy’s pulse is steady, his breathing regular; all is well.

They stay like that for a time, settling into sync with each other. It feels, for the first time in a week, as if everything is as it was between them. Even better, perhaps, with the understanding they’ve so recently come to.

Tentatively, Jamie begins to slide one hand up Tommy’s body, to his chest. He waits for any sign of tension, but Tommy stays quite relaxed. For a time he simply amuses himself drawing his fingers through the wet curls of hair there. Then, very deliberately, he rubs the pad of his thumb over one of Tommy’s nipples. It hardens beneath his touch at once, and Tommy’s breath catches.

“Mmm?” Jamie hums questioningly against his back. He leaves off touching directly, and simply drags the tip of his finger in a circle around it, waiting for Tommy’s response. His own are hugely sensitive, and he quite wishes to see if it’s the same for Tommy.

“Mm,” Tommy sighs, wordlessly, and then, with some effort, “Mmhm. That’s - that’s alright.” He sounds nervous but not frightened, and not dull or distant as if he’s wandered right out of his own awareness.

Jamie rubs his thumb slowly back and forth across Tommy’s hard nipple, reveling at the way the stiff little nub presses up under his touch. Closing his eyes, he ducks his face against Tommy’s back and focuses on his hands, on what he feels. He takes Tommy’s nipple between his thumb and forefinger and squeezes gently, then gives it a brief tug, and is rewarded with a shudder and an indrawn gasp.

Thus encouraged, he brings his other hand up to play with both of them, and passes a sweet span of time simply doing that. He experiments methodically with different types of touching, to see how Tommy responds to being tweaked or tugged or gently pinched. What he seems to like best is when Jamie simply rolls them between his thumb and finger. 

After a time, Jamie shifts back and encourages Tommy to lean more fully against him. This puts Tommy’s neck in range of his mouth, so that he can kiss and suckle at the delicate skin beneath his ear and in the hollow of his shoulder. Obligingly, Tommy lets his head roll over against his other shoulder, baring a pale expanse of neck which Jamie sets to marking up with eagerness.

He pulls one hand away from Tommy’s chest to caress the rest of him, stroking with his nails and fingertips up and down the line of Tommy’s body. Chest to belly to hip, then back up again. Down along his flank, provoking a brief fit of ticklish wriggling. Down his hip and the outside of his thigh to his knee, then back up the inside of his leg, touching the delicate skin there with only the barest brush of his fingers. He is careful not to touch Tommy’s groin.

He stops only reluctantly. He could happily go on touching Tommy and listening to him make those whimpery little sounds for the rest of the night. The water is cool now, though, and dirty. Once he notices that he doesn’t wish to sit in it any longer. By now Tommy’s knees are probably sore as well.

He pats gently at Tommy’s face to get his attention. “Up,” he says softly into Tommy’s ear. Tommy shivers, but doesn’t move. Jamie slips a hand between their bodies and pushes at him. “Bed now, Tommy.”

Groaning, Tommy sits up. Grasping the edge of the tub with both hands, he levers himself up to his feet, accompanied by a brief symphony of crackling joints. “Oh, it’s cold now. Look, Jay,” he says, turning to hold his hands out, “I’m all shrivelly and pruney now.”

His fingertips have indeed gone wrinkled from being submerged for so long, but there’s another part of him that doesn’t seem shriveled in the least. Jamie looks at his cock, standing out pink-flushed and not quite stiff - but a long way away from limp - from its nest of wet dark curls, then up at his face, and smiles slowly.

Blushing, Tommy half-turns and bends to grab a towel. That’s a view Jamie is quite content to stand and watch as well. Tommy rubs himself hastily dry, darting little glances back over his shoulder at Jamie as he does so. 

Jamie steps out from the tub and wipes himself dry more slowly. He’s in quite a state as well, and distracted almost as much by his own arousal as he is the evidence of Tommy’s. It’s a novel sensation to stand and move about naked and hard as he is. He’s well familiar with how it feels to get hard in his jeans, when his cock is held firm and still by the thick denim, and how the sensation can shift between uncomfortable constraint and pleasurable friction as he moves. Now, though, he’s tantalizingly aware of the taut weight of it bobbing about as he moves. His whole groin is like a clenched muscle, heavy and hot and tight.

Tommy is looking at him. It’s only fair, with how often he himself has admired Tommy’s body just this evening alone. Nonetheless, the urge to turn away and hide himself is powerful. It is one thing to allow himself to feel this way, another entirely to be seen to do so. He forces himself to stand still, knees locked, belly tight and trembling, breath shivering in and out. He can’t quite meet Tommy’s eyes. The ugly, scarred little thing between his legs likes being looked at, though. It twitches and Tommy takes in a single sharp breath at the sight.

“Are you alright, Jay?” Tommy asks. The floorboards creak beneath his feet as he steps closer.

“Fine,” Jamie whispers. He does not mean to, but that’s all the sound that will come out of him. His face is burning. His guts are burning. He clenches his hands into fists, nails digging into his palms. It’s just Tommy. 

“You don’t look alright.” Another slow creak, another step closer. “If you’re scared or - or thinking about - about - about things, then I don’t want to -”

“Not scared.” Jamie reaches out blindly and grabs onto Tommy’s arm. It’s all a muddled whirl in his own head, the difference between touching Tommy and standing there being  _ looked _ at. The image keeps intruding of standing barefoot on the cold stone floor of the infirmary - eyes down, hands in trembling fists at his sides - cold metal against his bare skin - the doctor walking slowly around him,  _ looking _ , pinching and prodding and touching, sighing and humming and clucking his tongue - 

He pushes that out of his head. Past. Over. Gone. Not here, not now. Now there are the creaking wooden floors, the faint sounds of speech and laughter and fucking from other rooms, the low rumble of the crowd in the common room below, the wind sighing by outside. Now there is the warmth of Tommy’s arm under his hand, the solid presence of Tommy’s body beside him. Now there is the bed, which he pulls Tommy towards. It’ll be better there. He won’t be standing out in the middle of everything all exposed.

He slides in between the sheets - scratchy and cool and just a little stiff - and holds them invitingly open for Tommy.

Tommy slides rustling in beside him, sitting close enough their knees touch, and puts a hand to his cheek. His eyes are round and dark and warm and full of concern. “Are you truly alright? You went distant there for a time, and don’t you try to tell me you didn’t, for I know you as well as I do anyone.”

“Alright,” Jamie reassures him. Then, more honestly, “Better.” 

“What was it?” Tommy asks. His hand slides up the side of Jamie’s face and into his hair, nails scratching gently over his scalp.

“Mmm?” 

“What was it that bothered you? If we’re going to be doing this sort of thing -” a brief pause, and even though his eyes have slid shut, he can hear Tommy’s blush in his voice - “more often, then I want to know what I oughtn’t do.”

“Just…” Jamie trails off, frowning. He takes a breath, then lets it out in a gusty sigh. “I don’t know how to say. It was too much. This is better.” Reaching out, he draws his fingers slowly down the line of Tommy’s arm. They’re touching from hip to knee, turned in towards each other the way flowers will grow towards the sun, and though it’s not a comfortable position to hold for any length of time, it’s far better to be close and touching. 

The drape of the sheet doesn’t cover all that much with the two of them sitting together so. Certainly it does little and less in the service of hiding Jamie’s arousal; the way it’s tented over his lap is at once comical and obscenely suggestive. Still, there’s something wickedly delightsome about sitting beneath it with Tommy and knowing that they’re both naked, moreso than if they were uncovered.

“If you say so,” Tommy says, only a little doubtfully. “Do you still want to - ?” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but simply makes a vague gesture.

“Yes.” Jamie catches Tommy’s eyes with his own, hand cupping the warm curve of his bare shoulder. “Do you?”

“I -” Tommy ducks his head and breaks eye contact, then glances shyly back up. “I surely do, Jay, yes. If you want to.”

“I surely do.” Immediately, though, a logistical problem presents itself. He thinks at first to climb into Tommy’s lap. It’s what they usually do, after all - but they’re usually wearing clothes, not naked together in bed. As much as he wants to go on, there’s a lingering nervous tension buzzing just beneath the surface of his skin, and he thinks he’ll likely need to work himself back up to that. So - “Lay down,” he says finally, shifting aside so Tommy can move.

Tommy obligingly slides down to lay flat on his back, wiggling a bit against the bed. Gathering the sheets up around his shoulders, Jamie shifts up onto his knees, for a moment looking down at him. Then he plants a hand on either side of Tommy’s head and bends to kiss him. Tommy brings his hands up to lace together across the back of Jamie’s neck.

There is nothing difficult, at least, about this. It is simple and familiar and dizzyingly sweet. Tommy’s mouth opens for him, hot and humid as a summer evening. Their lips slide softly together, their tongues touch, and they breathe together as one. 

Every inch of Jamie’s skin is electric. The weight of the sheet across his back is almost too much, with how rough it is and how all-over it touches him. The presence of Tommy’s body beneath him - not quite touching his, save for here and there - his knee against Tommy’s ribs, his thumbs on Tommy’s neck, Tommy’s hands on his - is not quite enough. He moves to lay down and slot himself in against Tommy, propped up just a bit on one elbow. His cock brushes against Tommy’s side, making him shudder. Without even thinking about it, he lifts his knee and slides his leg across Tommy’s stomach, 

“Oh,” Tommy says in a tight, breathless voice. He reaches down and takes hold of Jamie’s leg just behind the knee, hitching it up a bit. “Oh, Jay -” 

Jamie takes him by the chin and turns his head to keep kissing him. Deeply now, desperate now, whining urgently and wordlessly into Tommy’s mouth. He trembles all over with the effort of staying still. He tries to distract himself by touching Tommy again. With shaking fingers he strokes Tommy’s chest and belly and tweaks at his stiff nipples. It makes Tommy moan into his mouth and squirm, which only draws his awareness back to his own cock, pressed hot and throbbing between their bodies. 

Eventually, he simply cannot take it anymore. It can only have been a handful of minutes at the most, but when he pulls away from kissing Tommy, he feels like a man waking up from a thousand years of slumber. He buries his face against Tommy’s shoulder and simply lays there, all over sweat and shaking, barely daring to even breathe. His balls are drawn up tight and hard against his body, his pulse is pounding between his ears and between his legs, and it feels like there’s a coiled spring buried at the base of his cock, just the barest nudge away from springing. He’s so close he cannot even move away for fear it’ll send him spilling over the edge.

“Jay?” Tommy says, letting go of his knee to reach up and touch his hip. “What is it? Are you alright?”

Unable to speak - unable to even attempt - Jamie simply nods emphatically. That’s not enough, though. Tommy starts to sit up, shifting against him - Jamie lets loose a shaky, sobbing moan and digs his nails into Tommy’s shoulder - then lets up, not wanting to hurt Tommy, not wanting to frighten him when he can’t say what it is - he rolls over onto his back -

A single shuddering contraction squeezes at the muscles of his groin. His cock jerks sharply once, twice, and a thick trickle of hot fluid comes sliding out the tip and runs down the shaft. He makes another ragged noise, grabbing at the sheets beneath him, and waits trembling to see if it’s going to tip him over the edge or not. After an endless breathless moment, the arch of his body relaxes and he decides that maybe it’s not.

“Jamie?” Slowly, he opens his eyes and turns his head to look at Tommy, who is gazing at him with frank concern. “Do we need to stop?”

Jamie shakes his head. With great effort, he opens his mouth and manages to say, “Fine. M’fine. Just. A moment.” Now that he isn’t touching Tommy any longer, the startling fever pitch of his arousal is beginning to die back down into a more manageable ache. He lays still and separate for a few moments more, trying to get his breathing under control, and then sits up. Pulling the sheet back over his shoulders, he swings one knee across Tommy’s legs and comes to rest straddling his thighs, holding himself up for the moment so his weight isn’t resting on Tommy.

Tommy rests his hands on Jamie’s waist, just barely touching him. “I know you said you’re fine, only -”

“Close,” Jamie breathes out. “Very - almost - needed. Just. A second. Fine now.”

At first Tommy doesn’t get it. Then his puzzled, concerned frown changes to a startled look, and he flushes even redder than he already was. “Oh! Oh, well…” He lifts one hand and puts it over his own red face, peeking at Jamie between his splayed fingers. “Is that not the whole - the whole point of this?”

“Don’t want to,” Jamie says, shuffling forward. “Not yet.” Soon, yes - very soon, from the feel of it, whether he’d like it to last longer or not. But not just now and not like that. 

He settles himself down and reaches down to take Tommy’s cock in hand. It’s wilted somewhat, no doubt from being worried - not for the first time, Jamie wishes his own were as responsive to his moods, or at least his bad ones - but it doesn’t take long at all to get him fully hard again. Jamie strokes him slowly, savoring the hot weight of it in his palm, eyes fixed on his face to watch for any signs of wandering or unhappiness.

At first Tommy stays still and quiet. Soon enough, though, he starts to shift and then to squirm outright, and begins making those sweet little whimpering sounds low in his throat. He takes his hand from his face and reaches out to grab at Jamie’s knee, his other hand tight on Jamie’s hip.

“Tommy. Tell me when.”

“When?” Tommy raises his head, staring up at Jamie with wide and glassy eyes, his mouth hanging open. “When what? When - oh. Oh, Jay, soon, very soon -” He trails off with a low moan, dropping his head back down to the bed.

Jamie shifts forward once more, so that he’s practically sitting across Tommy’s hips. Belly a-flutter with nervous excitement, he presses his own length up against Tommy’s, curling his fingers around them both. Neither of them is particularly well-endowed, but his hand is small, and it’s a bit of a stretch.

Tommy actually goes up on his elbows, staring wild-eyed down the length of his body. “What -” he starts to ask, though it’s perfectly obvious, but then Jamie rocks his hips experimentally and he breaks off in a shuddering moan. “Oh,  _ Jay _ .”

Now Jamie lets himself move, rutting against Tommy as shamelessly as he pleases. The contrast between the movement of his hips and the movement of his hand is awkward, each stuttering when the other gets into a rhythm, but he hardly cares. It’s even better than he could have imagined. The sensation of his own cock sliding against the length of Tommy’s is indescribable, beautiful and filthy and perfect. Filling his hand with both their hard cocks - stretching his fingers to curl around and hold them both - stroking up and down and feeling the heat and the skin-soft firmness of them both sliding against his palm - is obscenely pleasurable in a way touching himself has never been.

He chances a glance down just once, curious to see. The contrast between them is beautiful as well. His is shorter and slimmer, small the same way he is, brown against the livid red flush of Tommy’s, though the heads are nearly the same dusky purple color. He looks just long enough to fix the picture in his mind, then fixes his gaze back on Tommy’s face.

He comes first. It builds and builds, the spring in his belly winding tighter and tighter, until he begins to fear he won’t be able to and the pleasure will simply build and build and never peak. Then, all at once, it rolls over and engulfs him. He shudders wildly, cock spasming in his hand, every muscle in his stomach and pelvis clenching and contracting. His spend comes pulsing out and drips down their cocks to puddle on Tommy’s balls and thighs beneath. It slicks his hand, turning the sound of him stroking Tommy off obscenely wet and loud. The sight and sound of it provokes another, smaller fit of shuddering and spasming in him, and draws another trickle of sticky fluid from his cock.

Tommy follows not long after, writhing beneath him and moaning his name like a prayer. His goes shooting up his body to land in sticky strings on his chest and stomach, smearing in the hair there.

Jamie keeps stroking the both of them, slower and slower, until it tips over into being painful for him. Then he lets go and sits back, breathing hard, still trembling a bit with the aftershocks of his orgasm. When he looks down, he sees that Tommy is smeared with the fluid of their bodies, and another slow pulse of lust rolls through him.

Thighs trembling, Jamie dismounts Tommy and flops bonelessly beside him, curling one arm around his chest. There’s a patch of sticky wetness beneath his arm, but right then he pays no mind to that. He kisses up Tommy’s neck, feeling the pulse pound beneath his lips, and makes his way over to his mouth.

Tommy kisses him back in a vague, exhausted sort of way, as if the effort of it is almost more than he can bear.

“Oh, Jay,” he says. “Love you, Jay.” And that is all that either of them says for a time. They both drowse together, not quite falling into true sleep but skirting the edge of it.

Right on the cusp of falling truly asleep, Jamie rouses himself and looks down the length of Tommy’s body, at the mess they’ve made of him. “Mm,” he says, a little ruefully. “Should have waited for the bath, maybe.”

With a faint groan, Tommy raises his head, squints blearily down the length of his own body, and lets it drop again. “S’fine,” he mumbles, waving a hand vaguely.

The longer Jamie looks, though, the more it bothers him. Five minutes ago the sight of their mingled spend streaking Tommy’s body had been powerfully erotic. Now it brings to mind another one of those helpless,  _ small _ memories: held down flat and rutted against, the slit in the tip of the doctor’s cock as big as the borehole of a gun as it spilled out spurt after spurt of sticky white seed, leaving him smeared and shamed to clean the mess off - but he isn’t clean, he still isn’t clean, even all these years later he can still feel it, he can still feel all of it - 

He turns his mind forcefully from that path of thought. He’s not going to spoil things, not after it went so well. Instead he sits up, fighting the heavy drowsiness that suffuses every inch of his body, and goes to fetch the towel. He paddles his soiled hand in the bathwater ‘til it’s clean, then dips the corner of the towel in to wipe his soft cock and thighs clean. Then he takes it over to clean Tommy off with, for the bulk of the mess landed on him. It’s well cooled by now, so Tommy flinches, stomach twitching, when Jamie touches him with it.

“Sorry,” he says. “Done soon.” It is only the work of a few moments. First he wipes Tommy’s stomach clean of the mess, then he takes the towel and goes to work - much more gently - on his thigh and groin. It’s started to dry tackily in the hair there, so that takes a bit more work, but soon Tommy is clean as new. Jamie drops the soiled towel carelessly to the floor and climbs back under the sheet with him, snuggling in against his warm side.

\---

The door swings open, creaking. 

Jamie sits bolt upright, groping for a gun that is not there. Terror sings through him. The taste of hot metal fills his mouth. He has no gun, he has no knife, he is naked and defenseless and there is  _ someone in his room - _

Then he finally understands what he is looking at, and relaxes minutely. It is not -  _ the doctor  _ \- an enemy, but simply a barmaid bringing the dinner he’d bought. 

They stare at each other for a long, silent moment. Her gaze tracks slowly around the room. Him, sitting like a knife ready to be thrown. The sleeping form of Tommy beside him. The washtub full of cold, dirty water. Him, again. Wrinkling her nose a bit, she comes stepping in and sets the serving platter down on the bedside table, glancing once more down at Tommy.

Stifling the urge to bare his teeth, Jamie pointedly tugs the sheet higher up around Tommy’s shoulders. That she’s looking at him - looking at the both of them, and thinking about how they must have spent their evening - is bad enough. He can’t bear the thought of her eyes crawling over Tommy while he’s asleep and unknowing.

“Brought you dinner,” she says, gesturing towards the platter. 

“Thank you.”

“I’ll go ahead and get rid of the tub, shall I?” 

Jamie shakes his head. “Leave it. Tomorrow.”

Her mouth goes flat with disapproval. Likely they’ve other customers who want a wash and only so many washtubs - bulky things, they are - but just right then he can’t stand the idea of her in there for any longer, or anyone else coming in to help her haul the thing away. “Alright.”

Even after she leaves, he can’t relax. As soon as the door shuts behind her, he slides out of bed and pads over to it to lock it. On the way back he picks up his gunbelt, pauses, and then digs his knife up out of his pack as well. The gunbelt he hangs over the bedpost, within easy reach. The knife he slides beneath the pillow.

Then he gently shakes Tommy awake. By his internal clock, it’s only been about half an hour, so Tommy is not deeply asleep. He comes up out of his doze groggily, muttering and blinking.

“S’not morning time, is it?” he asks, yawning hugely in the middle of his question.

“No. It’s dinner time.” 

Jamie takes his portion and begins to eat more out of a sense of practicality than anything else. Food is fuel, he is a long way away from the days when there was a kitchen from which meals flowed at regular and predictable intervals, and so he will eat what’s there when it’s there. He doesn’t expect to enjoy it. His stomach is still a tight, sour ball from being woken by a stranger coming into the room.

However, he finds himself unexpectedly ravenous, and after the first few bites, positively wolfs the meal down. It’s simple fare: chunky stew and tough bread, with cool water to drink. The water tastes earthy and leaves a gritty feeling on his teeth. Still, he eats every bite, sops his bowl clean with the heel of the bread, and drinks down half the pitcher. Sex, it seems, is hungry work.

He glances sidelong at Tommy, smiling a little. He is always very fond of Tommy, but just now he feels especially tender. Most of the pleasant, drifting lassitude from earlier is gone, but the sensation remains of something special shared between the two of them. He shifts a little closer in bed, so that they’re touching again, knee to hip to shoulder. 

“Are you - how are you feeling, Jay?” Tommy asks eventually, almost hesitant.

Jamie has to stop and consult himself on that one. It had been such a momentous decision to do this thing - an impulsive attempt the first time, but this evening was planned, and half a hundred times he’d thought of simply calling it off and pretending the initial incident had never happened so that they could simply go on as they had before - that he feels he should feel different. The very first time he ever did anything like this, when he was young, it made him feel smaller and soiled. Perhaps, then, he should feel larger, or cleaner, or refreshed in mind and spirit, but he does not. He supposes, if anything, he feels about the size he is. He feels satisfied and as if his skin fits.

“Alright,” he says, finally. “Good. What about you?” He reaches out and puts his hand high up on Tommy’s thigh, near where it joins his body. “Are your hips alright?” He’s not a particularly heavy man, he knows, but it doesn’t take much force to push Tommy’s joints out of true.

“Oh - uh - they’re - they’re fine, Jay, yes. Just fine. Nothing hurts at all. Well -” he ducks his head a bit, as if realizing that Jamie could not possibly believe such a colossal untruth - “nothing hurts very much at all.”

Silence falls between them. It is not the usual easy silence that they share. It’s hardly silence at all, so loud is it with things almost-spoken. The two of them keep looking at each other in quick sidelong peeks, and then looking quickly away when their eyes accidentally meet.

“I’m sorry for all that mess,” Tommy blurts out eventually.

Caught off-guard, Jamie simply echoes, “Sorry…?”

“All the - well - you know -” Tommy waves vaguely towards his own body. “I ought to have helped you clean it up, only I just went and fell asleep. I won’t do so again, though - uh -” A sudden, stricken pause. “That is, I don’t mean to presume that such a thing might happen again, only if it does, I shan’t leave it to you to deal with the mess, is all I mean.” Slowly, Tommy raises both hands and puts them over his blushing face.

Amused, Jamie touches one of his wrists. “It’s okay. Wasn’t just  _ your _ mess, after all.” To this Tommy gives an acknowledging squeak. “As for the rest…” Now he finds himself falling victim to the same shyness which has Tommy so firmly in its grip. He tries several times to speak, without success, before he finally manages, “I’d like to. Do it again. If you would. When we can.” 

Which is like to be an issue as much as his own difficulties, if not more. It isn’t often they have the chance to sneak away together. He couldn’t stand to try doing anything in camp itself, not even under cover of night and beneath their blankets when everyone else is asleep. Even the thought of it makes his stomach churn.

“Oh, aye, I surely would. It was very nice. No, much more than that, I cannot simply say it was  _ nice,  _ as if speaking of a temperate day, can I? No, it was so much more beautiful than that, but to what shall I compare it?”

Jamie leans his head against Tommy’s shoulder and lets him muse on to himself, the sound of his voice falling into a distant background murmur. His mind wants to worry about the future, but he does not wish to follow it down that track, and so he simply lets himself sink down below it. He falls into the state where he simply  _ is _ , where he is simply  _ aware _ , and lets himself feel that. His belly is full, his body is warm and comfortable, and he is still full of the echoes of the earlier evening’s deep and drowsy satiation. Tommy is here, they are alone, and no one can come upon them unexpected.

Some time later, he comes back to himself. Tommy is saying his name, and peering down into his face close enough that his own has become a featureless blur. Jamie draws his head back, more to rid himself of the dizzying image of Tommy’s face as a fuzzy mass of skin and shadows, but Tommy seems to take it as having surprised him, for he draws back himself and lifts his hand off Jamie’s shoulder, palm out.

“Sorry, Jay, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t. What is it?” From gentle poetic musings on how to describe their joining, Tommy seems to have gotten onto a less pleasant train of thought. He looks all a-fret, mouth pinched in and eyes all dark and worried.

“Well - I was just wanting to know - I’ve just been going on and on, I have, and not even thought to ask, but - you did enjoy yourself, didn’t you, Jay? For I certainly didn’t do much to - to ensure it was pleasant for you, did I? And I don’t wish for you to always be doing all the work, for you deserve to feel - to feel all sorts of delightsome things, you do, and, well, I just thought that perhaps next time, is there… anything you’d wish for me to do for you…?” 

“Enjoyed myself plenty,” Jamie says at once. “You needn’t worry about that, Tommy.” There is more to it than that - there is the exquisite pleasure of having given Tommy such pleasure, the powerful thrill of knowing that a simple caress or kiss from him could have such a dramatic effect - but he does not know how to speak of it. Nor does he know how to speak of the other side of the coin: the fear of ceding such power over himself to anyone, even Tommy.

“Oh, but, are you certain? I don’t wish to be selfish.” He takes both of Jamie’s hands up in his. Seeing Tommy’s big, broad, pale hands wrapped around his own smaller ones makes Jamie picture, suddenly and vividly, one of those hands wrapped around his cock, and he shivers. “You made me feel so good, Jay, and I want to do the same for you.”

Jamie swallows. He is caught in Tommy’s dark and earnest gaze. The last thing he wants to do is put Tommy off, but he can’t say that he wants to do anything differently. “You did,” he says softly, squeezing down on Tommy’s hands. 

“But I didn’t even do anything, save for lay there and let you - let you go to all that trouble touching me.”

“It wasn’t trouble.” Another careful squeeze. Jamie wishes, not for the first time, that he were better at speaking, that his thoughts were easier to put into words. Had he Cuthbert’s easy way with speech, or Alain’s calm forthrightness, or even Tommy’s way of spinning words out into poetic rambling, so strange but so sweet - well, then it might be different. Then perhaps he could explain how large he’d felt, sitting astride Tommy’s hips like that and looking down at him. “It made me feel good to do. Don’t worry about it, please.”

Tommy looks doubtful still, but he blessedly doesn’t keep pressing. He drops his gaze down to Jamie’s hands instead, still caught between his, and begins to gently trace the shape of the red stain on the right one. Between the plummy splotches on his face and the stain on his hand, Jamie is used to folk staring. Used to folk forking the sign of the evil eye at him, too. Tommy’s fascination he mostly finds amusing, for Tommy, he knows, is interested more in the play of color and the sinuous shape of the stain than in any back-country superstition.

The careful way Tommy’s fingertips brush over the skin of his hand is pleasurable in its own right. Jamie lets him do it for a time, enjoying the tingling warmth of the touch, then reaches out and grips his wrist with his free hand.

“Ought to go to sleep,” he says. “We’ll be up early.”

“Oh, no,” says Tommy vaguely. “Roland means to stay here a time, I heard him say. He was telling Bert all about it while Bert walked me into town. They mean to do a recruitment here, I believe, and ask if anyone’s heard aught of the Good Man in these parts. Think perhaps there’s something else they’re after, too, for there was something he nearly spoke of but didn’t, since I was there.” He laughs a little. “Nothing silly, daft Tommy needs to know about, though. Perhaps he’ll have you out looking for it tomorrow, though.”

“Roland’s business is yours,” Jamie says, frowning slightly. “We’re ka-tet.” At that Tommy simply shrugs, a rueful smile curving the corners of his mouth. “How long?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some days, I’m sure. I reckon you can ask him or Bert tomorrow over breakfast.” Yawning, Tommy wiggles down to lay flat in bed. “Now that you mention it, though, I am powerful tired. Will be nice to sleep and not wake up all stiff and cold from the ground, it will.”

Jamie lays once more beside him, pressed up against his side with his head on Tommy’s chest. Beneath his ear he can hear the slow whoosh of Tommy’s breath and the steady beat of his heart and all the various mysterious gurglings of his insides. All the parts of the Tommy-machine are running in good order. Thus reassured, he closes his eyes and lets himself drift off.


	3. Chapter 3

Thomas slinks down to the common room late that morning, filled with a curious mixture of soaring elation and sneaking guilt. Surely everyone can see it on his face, for he’s never been much able to conceal his feelings. Surely everyone knows why he’s coming down to eat near noon, rather than shortly after the sunrise as befits a man who was taught to rise early and well for his whole life. He carries in his heart a hope that no one else he knows will be here at this time, which is dashed as soon as he turns away from paying for his breakfast at the counter.

“Ho there, Tommy-oh!” calls Cuthbert, standing to wave at him from across the room. He’s tucked up against a support beam, at a little table best fit for two. And there is, alas, room at it, for neither Alain nor Roland nor any other companion is there to be seen.

Thomas shuffles on over and sits down, trying not to look guilty. No reason to, he tries to tell himself, for surely if Cuthbert and Alain are allowed to have a Privacy to themselves whenever they wish, he and Jamie are allowed the same, are they not? Even in his own mind, though, trying to convince only his own self, it doesn’t quite track. “Good morn to you, Bert. Are you waiting for someone?”

“Oh, no, no one in particular. I’ve been out and running about all morning, I have, and so I came back to have a bit of a break.” Bert stretches ostentatiously, yawning hugely, to show just how restful he is. He puts Thomas in mind of a cat, he does, a slinky dark-furred cat all stretched out to nap in a beam of sunlight.

“Ah,” Thomas says. “Yes.” Out with Roland, no doubt, speaking with folk and taking in the lay of the land. The two of them together make quite a tight case for the New Affiliation, he knows, Roland all regal and stern and handsome Bert with his quick mind and quicker tongue. “And how,” he asks, hopeful of diverting Bert off the question of why he’s risen so late, “has that gone for you?”

“About how it usually does.” Bert shrugs one narrow shoulder. “Most folk out here don’t care much either way for the struggles of the Inner Baronies, you know. They want to plant their fields and plow their wives and harvest their crops and keep to themselves. There’s talk of a cache of old war-machines out in some barrow not too far from here, though, which has perked Roland up something considerable. Like as not it’ll all be rusted to shit and fall apart in our hands, but it’s worth taking a gander around, once we figure out where the damn place is supposed to be.”

While Bert speaks, a barmaid comes over to deliver his food. Perhaps it is only his own guilty conscience, but Thomas would swear her gaze lingers on him longer than necessary. He hunches his shoulders against it and begins to eat, nodding and making appropriately attentive noises.

“So,” says Bert, casual as anything, “you decided to take a nice morning in today, eh? Jamie keep you up all night, then, did he?”

Thomas inhales sharply and promptly begins to choke on a piece of sausage. Helpfully, Bert thumps him on the back until he coughs it back up. 

“Good lord,” Bert says, “are you alright? Don’t die in my keeping, dear, or Jamie will have me peeled and salted for it.”

“Fine,” Thomas wheezes, covering his face. That it’s gone all hot and red could well be attributed to having just started choking, but the fact that he did that is suspicious enough in and of itself. And sure enough, peeking through his fingers he can see a terribly gleeful grin starting to spread across Bert’s face.

“You  _ did _ pass a good evening together, didn’t you?” He claps Thomas on the back again, crowing in delight. “I guess he must have well and truly seduced you, eh? I’m so proud, Tom, I feel like a father seeing his son off to be married, I do. You must tell me how it was, you simply must.”

“Wasn’t anything,” Thomas mutters, sinking down into his seat and hoping vainly that the earth itself might swallow him up. That doesn’t strike him as right, though, for saying so as much as implies that Jamie didn’t do a good job with him, when exactly the opposite is true. It was such a lovely experience, so full of perfect heat and closeness and beauty, that he feels half-shamed for having taken it for himself. Surely a simple, daft Tommy like him doesn’t deserve something so lovely. But he can’t let Bert think that Jamie wasn’t any good, so he says even more quietly, “I mean, it was fine. Very lovely. No need to speak of it any more, I should think.”

Leaning in, Bert takes his wrists and pulls his hands away from his face. “Come now! I am curious unto death of how our boy Jamie must be in bed, and you know I’ll never get to find out for myself. Would you send me to my grave unsatisfied?”

At least, Thomas thinks distantly, they’re off the topic of his late arrival, and he doesn’t have to admit that it’s because he awoke just the same time as he always does, only from the sorts of dreams he doesn’t often have, and to find himself naked in bed with his perfect, beautiful Jay on top of that, and to find from there that Jamie had had the same sorts of dreams and was in the same sort of state that he was, and, well - 

His face grows even hotter, thinking of it. “That’s private, Bertie, that is.”

“Alright, then, at least tell me something - tell me what his manhood is like, for I’ve a bet with Al about it. Some small men have mighty big members on them, they do. Why -”   


Before Bert can continue speaking more of the members he’s encountered, Thomas says hurriedly, “That’s not any less private! I suppose, though, that I can tell you that it’s…” And now he pauses to think, casting his mind back to the sight of Jamie all gloriously bare and brown atop him, gorgeous as a riverbed, joined with him just as a river flowed into the great salt sea. “Well, it’s just as perfectly made for him as any ship was for its captain, Bertie. He’s all a masterpiece, he is, something that if a sculptor carved he would break all his chisels afterwards for he’d know he could never in his life make anything so perfect again, even if he lived a thousand years. He’s -”

“Okay,” Bert interrupts, amused. “Alright, I shan’t get anything sensible from you, that much is clear. That’s the price I pay for asking, I suppose. Fooling aside, though, I’m glad to see the two of you muddle through to mutual satisfaction. We simply must celebrate.”

“What? Oh, no, Bertie, that’s not necessary at all.” The celebration, anyway, is all in Thomas’s own heart. That much at least he can admit, that he’s selfishly delighted to have done it, that he loved the touch of Jamie’s hands and the sight of Jamie in his pleasure. Even should they never do it again, he’ll always have the memory to carry with him to whatever early grave no doubt awaits him. “It’s fine, really, it isn’t anything at all to remark on -”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense. I know the both of you have your troubles, and with what Jamie told us, well.” Bert shrugs again, looking more solemn this time. “There’s little enough happiness to go around in this fractured world, so I’m glad you two have found a piece. At the very least, let me stand you a round of drinks tonight, alright?”

“Don’t suppose I can stop you,” Thomas mutters. That sounds bearable enough. No public spectacle, just Bert and possibly Alain - who knows most everything Bert knows anyway - and a nice evening of drinks. Thomas doesn’t care much for being drunk, for it reminds him too closely of other times he’s lost his head, unpleasant times he doesn’t wish to think about - but a couple of beers, a little bit of a tipsiness, aye, that’s alright.

“I don’t suppose you can,” Bert agrees cheerfully.

\---

After Bert leaves on whatever business it is he has, Thomas passes the day at his own leisure. It’s quite a nice town they’ve found themselves in, and God only knows when they might find another so bustling and full. It’s been so long that at first he is overwhelmed, stepping out onto the street and seeing all the people buzzing to and fro about like a whole colony of busy bees. He stands in the shade of the inn’s awning for a time, letting his eyes and ears adjust to the crowd, and then steps out to be carried along with its currents.

He has no real goal in mind, and so he simply drifts. The first storefront he fetches up in front of is a milliner’s, the window full of a dazzling array of lovely hats. He stands for quite a while in front of that one, imagining each hat with an outfit - this one a lovely bold thing, best with vivid colors and straight lines; this one a sly one with its best nature brought out by flowing, graceful lines; this one a shy little thing that would prefer to be outshone by fabulous jewelry and impeccable tailoring. There is a lovely blue one he thinks of buying for Claire, for she does like to dress up when she has the chance and the color would perfectly match her sweet eyes, but he finally forces himself to leave without it. She’s nowhere to keep a fancy hat, and he’d hate to see it get all trailworn and dusty and dirty.

From there he drifts on down the street. For a time he stops to watch a smith at work, deep in the depths of his smithy. The smells of hot metal and fire come drifting out, along with the rhythmic banging of the hammer and the steady dragon’s-breath whoosh of the bellows. Thomas watches, wholly absorbed in fascination, as the man takes a slab of molten metal and hammers it into the straight blade of a sword. Sparks fly with every strike.

A man passes in front of him to enter the smithy, breaking his concentration. He takes that as another sign to move on. He simply walks down the broad avenue of the street, taking in the buildings and people. This town seems as if perhaps no one has yet told it that the world has moved on, that civilization has fallen; all is in good repair, the paint vivid and the signs bold and the buildings rising up over the street, two and even three storeys. He turns aimlessly down one side street and finds himself in shadow amongst houses which lean out so far overhead they’re nearly touching, like lovers just about to kiss.

That lane lets out abruptly onto a narrow strip of sward overlooking the river. Some ways up a waterwheel creaks as it endlessly rotates, while farther down the grass is dotted with folk walking and sitting. It’s a fine day, and a number are out a-picnicking, taking their afternoon meal with their friends and family. Others are clearly young couples, walking arm in arm. Thomas watches them with a curious sort of heady pride in his heart, wondering which of them might snatch a kiss, which of them will spend the night sharing each other’s heat and love and inner light. Improper of him to wonder, perhaps, but the thought of it is much on his mind today.

So absorbed is he in watching the people - and thinking of making this into a sketch, suggesting just the lines of the folk with broad strokes of charcoal, yes, and that reminds him that he ought to try and buy some paper here if he can, for he is running low on the scraps he’s salvaged so far - that he doesn’t even notice someone coming up behind him until, all a-sudden, a hand grasps his elbow.

“Why, hello, Tommy,” comes a low and lovely female voice, aye, a voice he knows very well indeed, so he only starts a bit as he turns to see her. “Fancy meeting you!”

“Hile, Claire,” he says, miming a bow. She’s a bit too close for him to do one properly without risking knocking his head into hears, and so he does not. “Are you having a wander today as well?”

“Something like that,” she agrees, smiling. “I broke my fast with Leeny, but she’s off on war business with your dinh now, and so I’ve been left to entertain myself.” Offering up her arm for him to take, she asks, “Would you be a gentleman and escort a fine lady about the town?”

Gallantly, Thomas slides his arm through hers. “Oh, I don’t know that I’m any sort of gentleman, but of course I will. Where would the lady like to go first?”

“Well,” says Claire, “I do believe I saw a lovely milliner’s on the high street…”

As soon as they get there, Thomas urges her to try on the hat he’d seen in the window. It suits her just as well as he’d thought. Perched atop her lovely mass of sunny blonde curls, it looks quite like a piece of sky, and the width of the brim matches her shoulders and hips - substantial, both of them, for she is shaped much like her younger brother, only moreso - so that she is quite imposingly beautiful.

Next she tries on a sunhat woven of straw, with a red ribbon wrapped around it, which makes her look fetchingly girlish. Then a saucy little number with a veil, which doesn’t go at all with what she’s wearing but does lend her an air of exciting mystery. Then, just for fun, she snatches up an ostentatiously decorated, wide-brimmed hat that puts Thomas in mind of nothing so much as the ladies who used to go to the Church of the Man-Jesus every restday. As soon as it touches her head her whole face changes into a perfect imitation of those ladies - prim and purse-lipped, tipped back to peer haughtily down her round little snub nose. Even though she stands near half a foot shorter than Thomas, that icy blue look makes him feel small indeed, perhaps the size of a scurrying little ant.

She holds that face for a beat, then two, and then dissolves into a fit of giggling, her round face going all red. “We ought to go,” she says softly to Thomas once the laughter has passed. “The shop-owner is getting a bit cross with us since we don’t intend to buy anything.”

“Perhaps he ought to pay you to stand outside modeling his hats,” Thomas suggests, “for surely a beautiful lady out front would attract the sorts of paying customers he wants.”

“Oh, hush your flatterer’s mouth, Thomas.” Claire delivers a playful smack to his shoulder - quite a solid one, for she’s a well-built lady. “Let us go. Was there anything you wished to do, today?”

Thomas cannot think of a single thing, though he knows there had been. Mostly, right now, he wishes to sit, for his knees and hips and ankles are all beginning to twinge at him warningly. “Would quite like to sit and watch the river,” he says. “Maybe get my paints first and - oh! I had wished to see if anyone around here sells scrap paper. I don’t suppose ‘tis likely, but -”

“I do believe I saw a scriber’s shop, actually,” Claire says thoughtfully. “I think mostly a place for folk to set down contracts and such, you know, but might be he’d have some scrap to sell you.”

Excitement flares up inside him, so much so he forgets all about his aching legs. “Truly?” He grasps Claire’s hands, nearly hopping with excitement. Paper is rarer than gold, in these late times, and it is so seldom he can find any. Usually he makes do with the back of a map or the margins of a book, or various rough substitutes - parchments and vellum and such. To have actual paper - ! “Oh, let me go and fetch my paints and paper from the inn, and then you must take me there!”

Claire smiles at him fondly, and gently extracts her hands from his excitable grip. “Of course, dear. You may treat me to a bit of lunch, as well, while we’re there.”

\---

He leaves Claire downstairs, awaiting lunch, while he goes up to fetch his supplies. He carries a faint hope, as he opens the door, that perhaps Jay will still be in the room, and he might sneak a kiss or two. That hope turns itself all unbidden into a fantasy - the door will swing open and he will stride in and Jay will be laying there in bed, naked and beautiful against the rough grey no-color of the old sheets, and beckon him over, and perhaps he’ll have more than just a kiss, yes, perhaps he’ll go down on his knees and - 

He puts his hands to his hot face and takes a breath, willing the thoughts away. That’s too far, that is, no matter how much of a time he may have had last night or this morning. He’s no call to go around thinking such naughty things of his sweet Jay, no, nor getting himself all worked up when he’s meant to be having lunch with his dear friend’s sister, who is the closest thing to a proper lady that he supposes any of them know any longer.

It’s a moot point, anyway. The room is empty of anything save their belongings. Anything save Thomas’s belongings, in fact; Jamie’s gunna is all gone, no doubt strapped about Jamie’s person as he goes on whatever errands it is he has today. The bed has been roughly made and the washtub taken out, and the whole room has something of an empty air, as if it is simply waiting for them to leave so someone else can take their place.

That empty waiting feeling discomfits Thomas somewhat, so he is quick about pulling a sheaf of paper and the little bag in which he keeps his paint pots and brushes out. As always, he is tempted to leaf through the old pictures and see how they strike him now. Many of them - most of them, if he is being honest - are of Jamie, in part or in whole, and he thinks that just at this moment he could spend the rest of his life happily ruminating on the shallow curve of the bridge of Jamie’s nose and the narrow, perfect bow of Jamie’s lips and the lovely roundness of Jamie’s eyes…

But he does not. He gathers up what he needs to do a quick study of the river and heads back downstairs to keep Claire company. 

She’s been joined by someone, he can see from the stairs, who’s leaning over with their hand on her shoulder. At first he’s concerned that some random man has taken it upon himself to harass her - for she’s quite a lovely woman, she is, all soft and rounded curves and sweet curls - and then he thinks, taking in the fall of dark hair and the narrow, lanky body, that perhaps it’s Cuthbert speaking to her. As he makes his way across the common room he realizes his mistake; it’s Aileen. She’s sharp as Bert, certainly, but shorter and paler, and with close-cropped hair as well.

“Hile, Leeny,” he says cheerfully. “How goes the Affiliation’s business today?”

“Hile, Tommy,” Aileen returns, nodding to him. “It goes as well as can be expected. There’s something out in the woods which folk keep referring to in a coy sort of way, but no one can agree on if it’s south or east or west of here, so we may be some time searching.” Frowning, slightly, she adds, “I don’t know that I like us being settled so long in one place, though. ‘Twould be easy enough for some splinter of Farson’s forces to swoop in and wipe out near the whole New Affiliation at once.”

“Oh, do at least save your grim pronouncements of doom for after dinner, dear,” Claire says, reaching up to put her hand over Aileen’s where it rests on her shoulder. “Would you care to join us? Tommy and I are about to go visit the scriber’s shop and see if he can get himself some more paper to do his art on.”

“Oh,” Aileen asks, “have you been playing chaperone today, Tommy?”

“Far more than that,” Claire says, with a wicked glint to her eyes. “He’s been quite the gentleman today, showing me all about, taking me shopping and all. Later on we’re going for a lovely walk along the riverside as well. You best watch out, Leeny, or I’ll up and marry him after all.”

Aileen simply arches one shapely dark brow at Thomas, who ducks his head, flushing. In the year before the fall of Gilead, he’d begun fumblingly courting Claire, or at least making overtures to it. His father had made it quite clear he was to marry a lady and carry on the family name, and that if he couldn’t find one himself soon enough, one would be selected for him. Faced with the idea of wedding a woman his father chose, he’d decided to sound out Claire Johns, who he’d always thought was lovely and sweet and who had been kind to him when he was a boy. She’d seemed amenable. Once she’d had Alain pass on an assurance that if she said she wanted him, her father would acquiesce, for she was nearing twenty without so much as a prospective suitor to show for it and he was beginning to get - in her words - “all twisted up into a tizzy” about it.

Then, of course, calamity had come to the city, and it had become something of a moot point. Thomas certainly can’t say he’s happy to have traded the lives of every man, woman, and child in Gilead to get out of a marriage, but he can’t say that the freedom to be with Jamie doesn’t pick him up when he’s feeling gloomy, either. And Claire seems quite happy to be getting on with Aileen, herself.

“Thank you for looking after her,” Aileen says. She grips Thomas’s shoulder and gives it a brief squeeze. “I believe I will go with you, for someone ought to be looking after the both of you, truly.”

“We’re doing just fine looking after each other, thank you very much,” Claire says haughtily. She immediately spoils it by smiling softly up at Aileen, though. “I for one would quite enjoy your company, say true. Roland may have you back when I am done with you.”

“Is that so?” says Aileen softly. She looks down at Claire, her gaze all dark and pointed and intense, and Claire meets it steadily with a soft little smile curling her plump mouth up.

Thomas looks away, for it seems a very private sort of look between them and an impropriety for him to watch them at it.

“I do have everything that I wished to gather,” he says eventually, still looking fixedly up at the ceiling. ‘Tis not a bad view, for the vaulting of the beams that hold the second floor up over this wide-open common room is lovely to look upon, aye, as is the pattern of old ash and smoke-stains all over the natural brown grain of the wood. “So we may leave whenever you wish.”

“So we may stop standing around making doe’s eyes at each other whenever we wish, you mean?” asks Aileen, all sugary sweet, but with a hint of laughter underneath. “Aye, aye, let us go.”

\---

“I’ve some scrap I could bear to part with,” the scribe says, mouth puckering up as if to say it would be a dear sacrifice indeed, “but it will cost you precious, young lad.”

Thomas, a man of nearly twenty years old, is not used to being called a young lad. He can’t say he minds it, though, not from this old woman who reminds him so very much of a grandmother. Sort of a sharp, cantankerous type of grandmother, yes, but still with that essential grandmatronly shape to her.

“Well,” he says brightly, “I could pay you in coin, so I could -”

“Aye,” the scribe says, incredulous, “‘tis usually what I wish to be paid in, laddie -”

“-only,” he goes on, “I brought some of my things with me to see if we could trade, for I do have a lovely collection of inks of many colors, sai, and I had thought that perhaps if you liked the look of any of them, we could have a bit of a barter?”

She squints at him, sucking her teeth. “Let me see them.” Her tone makes it clear she doubts they will be anything much, but Thomas does not mind that. The art of making pigments is an arcane one, and though he has had some small success with it, why, he’s sure sai scribe here has forgotten more about it than he’ll ever know.

He brings out the case in which he carries his art supplies - what scraps of paper he can gather, the brushes and pens he’s found and bought and made, and most precious of all, the little pots of inks he’s collected. Carefully, he places it down on the scarred wooden table between them and opens it up.

The case itself is a handsome thing, though somewhat battered now. All leather it is, with shining brass buckles, and inside there are many cunning little pockets and loops to hold things. It’s another survivor of the castle, come with him all this long way from Gilead, which he supposes might make it precious to some. To him, what’s most precious is what’s inside of it.

He took care to clear out any of the drawings he didn’t want this stranger to see - the ones of Jamie, mostly - but there are still plenty of papers in there full of sketches and half-finished paintings.

The scribe eyes them over critically, then reaches in and plucks out a little glass bottle full of green pigment. Lively green, like the first tender shoots of spring grass - he’d had a devil of a time making sure it wasn’t too yellow. Next she picks up a pale perfect blue - the blue he’d use to paint Roland’s eyes, perhaps, or a sun-faded summer sky - and then a rich and shimmery purple, a royal color he’d labored long over.

She looks between the inks and Thomas, frowning thoughtfully, and then says, “What are you, some kind of wandering artist?” The word  _ artist _ comes out of her mouth sounding like  _ vagabond _ .

Beside him, Claire utters a ladylike snort. Thomas flushes a bit. “No, lady-sai, am… am a gunslinger, I suppose. I simply dabble a bit in drawing, I do. And ink-making, and tattooing - have built my own machine for that, in fact - and - well - oh, old Tommy is babbling on, he is. Do you find any of them to your fancy?”

“A gunslinger?” She eyes him up and down, frankly disbelieving, but then her gaze lands on the guns strapped to his hips. Heavy things, they are, and heavier still with the weight of her eyes on them. “A gunslinger, out of Gilead?”

“Yes, sai,” Thomas says, a lump growing in his throat. “Of the last graduating class, I am, before the city was destroyed. Only - that isn’t much about our business here, is it?” 

He does not wish her to look at him the way folk look at gunslingers. He does not wish her to think him some sort of sharpshooter or hero or solver of problems. Cuthbert or Alain or Roland or Jamie, perhaps,  yes, even lovely and deadly Aileen next to him, but not daft old Tommy, who only wears the guns because his father never had another son and he was never quite bad enough to fall out of the class and be allowed to quit. Better perhaps if he had, for then maybe he could have been an artist in truth, or wandered here and there fixing things, or built himself and Jamie a lovely little cottage on the seaside to live in… Except Jamie was born to the gun as well, wasn’t he, and has followed it a sight better than Thomas, hasn’t he?

Claire takes hold of his arm with both of her soft hands, squeezing a bit, drawing him back to the present moment. “We are part of the company that just came into town, sai, of the New Affiliation. Roland Deschain is our leader, son of Steven, who was dinh of Gilead when it still stood. Have you any need of our services, we can take you to speak with him. Thomas here just wishes to barter for some paper.”

“Oh, no,” the woman says, “I’ve no need of such chary folk in my own person. No, and no, and no again. Simply surprised, I was, to have a man of the gun coming into my own little shop, when it’s said you all died when the city fell.”

“Not all,” Claire says in a pleasant but very final sort of way.

The old scribe goes back to peering at Thomas’s inks, and finally takes three bottles - the spring green, a darker green, and a pale yellow that he privately thinks of as the color the sun would tun if you washed it too many times.

“I’ll give you a good helping of scrap for these three. I’ve an herbal to make, you see. It’ll be good paper, too, hardly used, and none of that stiff stuff made of reeds or tree bark neither.” So saying, she bustles off into the dusty depths of her little shop.

It  _ is _ good paper, and hardly used. Thomas likes to draw on used paper, for it is always a challenge to find clever ways to work the old writing or drawing into his new art. Silly though it is, it makes him feel as if for a moment he knows the person who left those marks, as if they are speaking to each other across years and untold wheels of distance.

“Thank you, sai,” he tells her. Not even realizing he is going to do it until he is halfway through the motion, he makes her a bow over his outstretched leg - a good bow, too, for he hardly wobbles. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

A smile breaks out on her face, making her look radiant. “And you as well, young lad,” she says.

Later, walking back, Thomas drops a hand to the butt of one of his guns and says, musingly, “Perhaps I ought not wear these about the town.”

Claire directs a worried look up towards him. Aileen stops dead in the street, staring as if he’d just declared his intention to strip naked and do cartwheels all the way back to the inn.

“Thomas Whitman,” she says, a dangerous edge to her voice, “you will do no such thing. Art thou mad? Thee wishes to walk about unstrapped and undefended in a strange place, with the world the way it is?”

“Well…” Thomas shrugs, not meeting her eyes. “Don’t suppose if a barmaid tried to kill me, I’d be able to pull iron on her anyway. It just seems a lot of trouble, you know -”

“Thomas.” Aileen steps forward and takes his hands. “Thomas Whitman, son of Colton. Whether you like it or not - and I am well aware you mostly do not, yes, I am - you are a gunslinger of Gilead. One of the very last gunslingers of Gilead, Thomas, and no less a man than my own Uncle Cortland gave you the right to wear those guns. However heavy they may weigh on you, would you dishonor his name by putting them aside?”

“Well…” He starts to put his hands together to wring them, only to find that Aileen is still holding onto them. In truth, he’d put the guns aside in a heartbeat if he thought he could, and he rather thinks old Master Cort had known better than most how unfit he truly was to bear the guns. Still, he knows what Aileen wants him to say, and he doesn’t really want to have this argument here. Not now, not here, and not with this woman, who has tried so hard to have what he was given but has never wanted. “Well, no, Leeny, I suppose I do not, at that.”

Before Aileen can say anything else, Claire reaches between them and rests one hand delicately atop hers. “Let us go, shall we? I don’t wish us to argue and spoil such a lovely day. This is no more dangerous a place than any other we’ve been in, and I’m sure Tommy won’t do anything foolish.”

Aileen looks skeptical, for which Thomas really can’t blame her. He suspects it’s a stretch for even kindly-minded Claire to say such a thing, for anyone who knows him knows that mostly all he does are foolish things. 

“Shall we go take a walk down by the river?” Claire asks brightly, looking between them. “There’s still plenty of daylight. Perhaps we could buy something to have for dinner -”

“Think I’d like to go back to the inn,” Thomas says softly. “Not that - the two of you should go have a dinner together, you should, only I’m just very tired, and a bit achey, and I should like to have a bit of a lay-down.” It isn’t even really a lie, for he does ache all down from his hips to his ankles, and it feels like perhaps a couple of his toes are starting to come unanchored from their rightful places.

“Oh, you aren’t going to go sulk, are you, Tommy?” asks Aileen.

Claire nudges an elbow into her ribs and asks, much more gently, “What she means to ask is if you’re alright, dear.”

“Am fine,” Thomas assures them. “Am not - not mad or upset or any such thing. I’m simply tired and I wish to go back to my room, and -” a bolt of inspiration strikes, for he has an excuse they’ll believe in a flash - “I’d like to see if Jay is back, for I haven’t spoken with him all day.”

For just a moment, an unexpectedly, almost wickedly gleeful grin crosses Claire’s face. It smooths out at once into a more proper sort of smile. “Of course, Tommy. Say hello to him for me if you do see him.”

“Oh,” Aileen starts to say, “but -” 

Before she can speak, Claire takes her firmly by the elbow and steers her away. Short though she is, and soft though she appears to be - especially in comparison with Aileen’s rangy, leanly muscled self - when she decides to move someone, that person is moved.

“Long days, Tommy!” she calls over her shoulder as she walks Aileen down the street, off towards the river and the grassy area surrounding it. 

Thomas watches them go, admiring for a moment the picturesque contrast they make: Claire short and round and buxom, dressed well as a proper lady, fair and blonde as a summer day, and Aileen narrow and lean with her close-cropped dark hair, dressed as a man in jeans and a button-up shirt. Then he turns and sets his own aching feet towards the inn.

Along the way, Cuthbert finds him. Thomas is not paying much attention, mind a-wandering as it often does while his feet walk him back, and he does not even notice he is being hailed until Bert grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him into a quick embrace.

“Tom, old boy, you are just the man I’ve been looking for!” He holds Thomas out at arm’s length, grinning at him. “Why the long face, though? You were so full of cheer when I left you this morning, whatever happened?”

“He’s just wandering,” Alain says softly, coming up beside Bert. He smiles gently at Thomas, offering him a nod. “Don’t harass the poor man, Bert.”

“Oh, fie, I’ve already told him I mean to.” Smoothly, Bert wraps an arm around Thomas’s shoulders and begins walking at his side. “Heading back home, Tommy? ‘Tis an auspicious meeting indeed, for as I believe I did say earlier, I owe you a drink or three or five -”

“Oh,” Thomas says, recalling their earlier conversation with some alarm, “oh, thank you, Bertie, only I was heading back to lay down and maybe speak with Jay, so -”

“Speak with him, hm?” Though Thomas is not looking at Cuthbert’s face, he can well imagine the salacious dancing of his eyebrows. “Is that how we’re calling it these days? Well, either way, you shan’t find him. Roland’s got him out in the woods looking for this thing we keep hearing about, though no one can agree what or where it is. Why, just earlier we had three people tell us there was some haunted old fortress out there!” He makes a rude noise. “I still say we’re going to find some old crumbling walls and rusted bayonets, haunted by nothing more sinister than the local kiddies who come there to screw.”

Thomas’s spirits sink right down to the soles of his feet. “How long do you reckon he’ll be gone, then?”

“Oh, ‘til last light,” Bert says breezily. “And it’s summer, so that’ll be a good few hours. Come share a dinner and some drinks with us, dear, and we’ll have you all relaxed and ready for him when he comes back, what do you say? Though -” he nudges Thomas in the side, a snicker in his voice - “take a care not to drink too much, eh? We wouldn’t want little Tommy Junior to fall asleep on the job, would we?”

“Bert,” Alain says, mildly reproachful.

“What?” Then, a moment later, “Oh, you mean my member.” He’s distracted enough by his disappointment that he won’t see Jamie until the evening - and then likely only when he comes in to go to sleep, no time for talking - that he hardly remembers to be embarrassed by the topic at hand. 

“Oh, don’t pull that disappointed schoolmarm voice with me, Al. Tommy gets it, doesn’t he?” Bert reaches around with his other arm and pats at Thomas’s chest. “I’m simply passing on my worldly knowledge to my dear friend here so he avoids a common pitfall. It seems a dreadful inconvenient problem, too. Can’t say I’m sorry not to have to worry about it. I’ve always found a drink or two to add admirably to the act, and I’d be right cross if it made my parts not work. Someone ought to speak to whoever was in charge of that particular bit of design, I’d say.”

Cuthbert prattles on in that vein for a time. Thomas doesn’t much bother trying to interrupt or interject, except to occasionally make a listening noise. He supposes that if he isn’t able to see Jay today, it can’t hurt to have a drink or two. Might even put him in better spirits. At the very least it’ll take his mind off his toes, and perhaps he’ll get a chance to sneak away and push them back in where they belong before the night is over. 

\---

Thomas folds his arms on the table and slowly lowers his head to rest on them. This turns the rest of the world sideways, a dizzying change he isn’t sure he likes at all, but he feels just as dubious about sitting upright, so he supposes it’s to be borne.

“Bertie,” he says slowly, “do you know - do you know what your problem is?”

“Well,” says Bertie, all thoughtful, “I am immensely handsome, for starters, as well as stunningly charming. Folk tend to get intimidated, they do.”

“You don’t know when to close your fool mouth,” Alain suggests from the other side of the table. “Don’t forget that one.” His round face is all red from the drink, the way it gets, though he doesn’t sound slurred in the slightest. A big man, is Alain, with a big capacity for drink.

“I’ve a talkative nature,” Bert says with great dignity. “I’ve ever so many thoughts floating around in my head, for - oh, there’s another problem, Tommy-oh! I’m wickedly clever. ‘Tis a heavy burden to bear, it is.”

“You’re very persuasive,” Thomas says, looking at the empty mugs lined up in front of him. “That’s your problem.” 

Bert considers this, and then agrees, very solemnly. “You’re absolutely right. You’re an excellent judge of character, old boy.”

“You mean he’s a bad influence,” Alain says, “who makes everyone around him make bad choices. That’s what you mean.”

“Aye,” intones Thomas mournfully. “That’s what I mean.” 

“Hey, now, this is slander, and I shall not stand for it. I simply make suggestions, and because I am so prodigiously clever, they are always excellent suggestions which any discerning person wishes to follow.” Bert sniffs. “You fellows can’t go about blaming me for your own lack of moral fortitude. I haven’t  _ made _ anyone do anything.”

One or two drinks, somehow, has unaccountably turned into five. Thomas has never had much of a head for sums, but it seems strange even to him that they should multiply that way. He’s sure, too, that Cuthbert’s cheerful insistence to “Have another one now, old Tom! You’re the man of the hour!” has something to do with it. And the inn serves good, strong beer too, so thick and yeasty one could practically hollow it out to make a trencher.

Consequently, he has sailed right on past tipsiness and run aground on the shoals of drunkenness. The vague, dazed way his thoughts circle about and the heavy numbness of his lips and tongue both remind him of a time he’d rather forget, but all in all it isn’t wholly unpleasant. He’s been mostly jolly, ‘til he thought once more of the almost-argument he’d almost had with Aileen earlier. That has put him on a dangerous path, for it is only a short jump from that thought to thoughts of how unsuited he is to carry the guns, and from there to thoughts of his unhappy childhood in Gilead, and from there his mind wanders all too easily to the last time he felt this way, so vague and easily unmoored in his own mind, just spinning about on the currents of his thoughts. He can barely remember anything of that time, and for sure it is a blessing. What he remembers mostly is the smoke and the strange and dizzy disorientation, the feeling of existing several feet outside of his own body… and the magician’s hands, his corpse-cold hands, and his red, red mouth…

Oh, how he wishes Jay were here! He would love nothing more than to rest his heavy dizzy head in Jamie’s lap and feel the warm touch of his clever little hands.

A hand comes down on his shoulder, not Jamie’s dainty little hand but Bert’s hand, narrow and long-fingered. “Don’t you always wish so, Tommy,” he says cheerily. “It’s coming on evening, so I’m sure your loverboy will be back in a couple hours’ time. In the meantime, you’ll simply have to be content with us.”

“Oh, I don’t mind you,” Thomas mumbles.

Bert laughs and gives his shoulder a squeeze. “Thank you for that ringing endorsement, my dear! I have always desired nothing more than to be tolerable.”

Thomas manages to make a vague noise of acknowledgement and closes his eyes. This helps with the disorientation somewhat - at least now he doesn’t have to see the room all sideways and blurry and moving about. He still feels unsteady, though, and now he’s much more aware of the sounds and smells of the room. It’s crowded with people, all talking together, most of them at a conversational level - but the combined number of them turns it into a dull roar of unintelligible speech sounds, crashing like waves against Thomas’s ears. Beneath it is the crackling of the hearthfire, which is warming the air to an uncomfortable degree and making everyone sweat, so that beneath the smells of food and ale there is the walloping odor of dozens of human bodies stuffed together into one room.

“You know,” says Alain, “I would quite like to go for a walk outside. Down to the river, perhaps. It’s a lovely evening.”

Bert starts to say, “Well, it’s actually a bit mug -” and then abruptly cuts himself off with a soft grunt. There is a moment of silence, and then he says, slowly, “Oh… well… I suppose a walk couldn’t hurt, yes. Let’s go. Heave-ho, Tommy-oh, let’s get some fresh air.” He slides his hands beneath Thomas’s arms and gently hefts him up.

Thomas goes to his feet willingly enough, though he stumbles a bit and falls back against Bert. Luckily Bert is steadier than he is and strong enough to hold him upright. There’s a flare of pain from his left foot, where those toes have still not been seen to - he’d meant to do it when he got up to the room, as he recalls, only he never managed to get up there, and he hardly wants to pull off his boots in the common room and go pushing his toes back into alignment - but the haze of alcohol helps mute it just as well as he’d hoped.

Bert ducks himself under Thomas’s arm and wraps one of his own around him to further steady him, then heads towards the door. “My, you have had quite a lot to drink, haven’t you?”

“And whose fault is that?” asks Thomas, but without any heat. He’s concentrating mostly on keeping his feet from tangling up together and pitching the both of them onto the floor, or, more likely, onto someone’s table. Bert, ever more graceful, weaves them easily through the occupied tables and knots of people and out the door.

The night air is close and damp, but not nearly as hot as inside the inn had been. It smells much cleaner, too, faintly of smoke but mostly of the wet and running scent of the river. Thomas breathes in a great grateful lungful of it, breathing out some of the nauseous tension that had built up in him.

“Truly,” says Bert in a pious tone, “who among us can say why these things happen? ‘Tis the will of God, or perhaps the Beams, or perhaps both.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure ‘twas the invisible hand of God bought Tommy all those drinks,” says Alain from his other side. “If you’re going to throw up, do it on Bert’s shoes, if you will.”

Truly, just being outside has cleared his head and calmed his belly enormously. Thomas simply nods, though, and lets himself be gently steered down the street. He gazes out upon the dark bulk of the woods surrounding the town and thinks of Jay out there, breathing in the same sweet summer air, looking up at the same fading evening sky, likely enjoying himself more out there than he would have even up in their own private little room.

They’re just sort of ambling about, generally towards the river but in no hurry, when a shop catches Thomas’s eye. He goes bobbing on past, carried along by his friends, and turns his head to look at it. An idea does a couple of lazy laps around his mind before finally finding its way out of his mouth.

“Oh, Bertie, stop - stop, I’d like to -” The rest of his words get lost as they slowly come to a stop. Bert carries on walking for a couple of steps, and carries Thomas along with him, only to abruptly stop, while Thomas attempts to keep walking. The resultant confusion nearly pitches them both to the ground, and it takes a bit of finagling to get all three of them stopped and turned around facing the right direction.

“What is it?” Bert asks, peering into his face. “You aren’t going to be ill, are you?”

“Oh, no, only - I’d like to go up there, I would.” Thomas waves vaguely in the direction of the shop he’d seen, then starts off towards it. He weaves a bit as he walks, as much due to being drunk as due to his increasingly painful foot. Bert and Alain catch him up quickly, one on either side should he fall, though neither of them reaches out to take hold of him. “Oh, yes,” he says with growing excitement as the sign comes more clearly into view, “it’s exactly what I’d thought.”

Bert looks at the sign, then at Thomas, eyebrows raised. “Tommy, old boy, dear one, you’re surely not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

“I am thinking,” says Thomas, drawing himself up to his full height and speaking with as much ponderous dignity as he can manage, “that I wish to get a tattoo.”

“Oh, no,” Bert says with obvious glee, “don’t you think you have enough of them already?”

“Absolutely not. There’s always room for more tattoos, so long as you’ve some skin free, and I’ve plenty of that.” Now he walks with purpose, striding towards the open door of the shop. It’s a handsome little place, tucked up between two larger buildings - likely not a main business, no, but just an aside sort of thing for the owner to make some extra money. And had they not gone rambling down this little side street, why, he might not have ever seen it.

Alain, reasonable fellow that he is, speaks up. “Should you perhaps wait until tomorrow, Tommy? We’ll be in town a while longer, I’m sure, and you’ll be clearer-headed in the morning -”

“He’ll have a head full of rocks and hammers in the morning, Al,” Bert opines. “Who wants to get needled all over when they’re sober?”

“I’m sure he’s gotten most of his tattoos sober,” Alain says.

Thomas hums in assent. “Given a good number of them to myself, I have,” he adds, “and you need a steady hand for that. I wouldn’t do that in a tipsiness, no I would not.”

“Well, there you go.” Bert claps him carefully on the back. “What a responsible fellow our Tommy is, eh?”

By then they’ve reached the door of the shop, and before anyone can argue against it, Thomas steps through. He eyes the place about. It is small but not overly cramped, and well kept. There are tiles up on the wall painted with designs, no doubt the artist’s own work.

“Hallo?” he calls out, for there is no one immediately apparent in the shop. Bert and Al come crowding up behind him, gazing about themselves - likely neither of them has been in such a place. They’re neither one of them much engaged in decorating themselves the way he is.

There comes a rustling sound, and a man emerges from the curtained-off section in back of the store. Thomas looks him over as well, for a good artist ought to be a canvas for his craft, or so he does believe. There are a fair number of tattoos visible on the fellow, some quite old, all of appealing quality.

“Good evening, sir,” Thomas says, nodding his head. “I’d like to hire your services as an artist, should you have the time.”

“Oh,” says Bert quietly from behind him, “what a fine turn of tongue he’s put on now.”

“Just you?” the man asks, glancing between him and the other two.

“Just me. Unless, I suppose -” Thomas turns to regard Bert and Alain somewhat unsteadily - “either of you would like to get a little something?” They both demur, and he turns back to the artist. “Just Tommy, then, aye.”

“And do you know what it is you’re wanting?” asks the man.

“Oh,” Thomas says brightly, “I surely do. I want -” and then he stops himself, closing his teeth gently on his own fool tongue. A moment, then another, and then he says carefully, not looking at either of his friends, “I’d like a bird, I would. Right down here.” He pats the tips of his fingers against the inner ridge of his right hip, trying not to notice the way his face is growing hot. “With just a spot of color to it, I believe.”

“Oh, aye, and what sort of bird would it be?”

_ Very _ fixedly not looking at either of his friends, Thomas says, “A jaybird, sai, if it please you.” He hears Bert’s chortle anyway, right in his ear, but is spared having to come up with any sort of dignified response. The man leads him over to the table upon which he will lay and proceeds, with professional speed, to strip him out of his pants and drawers and wipe him down with a wet cloth that smells of eye-watering alcohol.

“Oh  _ ho _ ,” Bert crows, leaning over him. “I didn’t know we’d be getting such a show!”

“Hush,” says Thomas, reaching up to push lightly at his face. “Or I’ll have you thrown out, see if I don’t.” He takes a care not to look down at himself, for the sight of his own member lying there all limp and pale against his thigh will surely spoil his anticipation. If Bert wants to gaze upon it, Thomas supposes he can, though he can’t imagine what pleasure he might take in seeing it in such a state. 

It cannot be said to be a quick process, though the man works with admirable deftness. He is very thorough and very steady, neither haltingly slow nor sloppily fast. Each prick of the needle draws Thomas out of his own thoughts and into that queer in-between space where he is still within himself but somehow distant, not feeling nor thinking of anything he usually feels or thinks about. He is aware of his body, of the skin having ink poked beneath it, of the tender way it’s bruising up and welling beads of blood, but at the same time the sensation is not unpleasant. It simply  _ is _ , and he simply  _ is _ , and all the other aches and pains of his shambling poorly-stitched old body fade into the same sort of feeling.

“Gods,” says Bert at one point, sounding horrified and fascinated in equal measure, and very far away, “I don’t know how you stand it, especially in so tender a place!”

Thomas simply hums and raises a hand to flap vaguely through the air. He does not wish to shrug and risk twitching and making a line go off true. Every so often he does dare a glance down to see how the bird is taking shape, and mostly his own view of himself is blocked by the artist’s arms and hands anyway. It looks to be a glorious thing, all bold black lines and touches of blue here and there.

And, of course, he knows what it truly means. As do Alain and Bertie, no doubt. As will Jay, when he sees it. Of course he has already been Jamie’s in mind and body for some time, and of course it was well known between them, but now he’ll have the ink on his skin to make it all bold and true and out loud even when he isn’t saying anything.

After the final pricking is done and all the blood and excess ink wiped away, the bandage put on, and the man paid, Thomas practically floats back to the inn. There he takes his leave of his friends and heads up to his room. Jamie isn’t there, no, but he falls into the bed they’d shared last night happily enough, and drifts off almost right away to sleep.


End file.
